Control A.5.6Contact with special interest groups
The organisation must establish and maintain contact with special interest groups, specialist security forums and professional associations.
The purpose is practical rather than social: early access to threat and vulnerability information, a route to advice from people who have handled the same problem, and a way to benchmark practice against peers. Information sharing and analysis arrangements, vendor security advisories, national CSIRT mailing lists and sector forums all count.
It is one of the least evidenced controls in Annex A, and one of the cheapest to implement genuinely. The evidence is participation — memberships held, feeds subscribed to, advisories acted on — and the connection to A.5.7 threat intelligence and A.8.8 vulnerability management is where the value actually lands.
Where this is treated as a box to tick, the organisation lists a membership nobody uses. Where it is treated seriously, it is one of the inputs that makes A.5.7 produce something other than a summary of the news.
How to put this in place
Threats and good practice change faster than a single team can follow alone. Contact with peers and specialist groups is a cheap way to hear early, and it feeds your risk assessment and patching.
- Choose one or two groups that fit your sector and size, such as an information-sharing group or a professional body.
- Record the memberships and who represents the organisation.
- Agree how useful information reaches the people who can act on it.
- Log examples where information received led to a change.
- Review once a year whether the memberships are still worth keeping.
Evidence an auditor usually looks for: the list of memberships and a few examples of information received and acted on, such as an advisory that led to a patch.
What is in the packs for this
From ISO 27001 Implementation & Certification Readiness. Each one helps with this requirement.
Annex A Control Implementation LibraryExcel
Its row in the Control Library: what it is for, practical steps, what an auditor samples, the usual owner, common mistakes and whether it usually applies.
Statement of Applicability TemplateExcel
Has its own row on the Statement of Applicability sheet, where you record whether it applies, why and how far it is implemented.