Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We held our latest Testing Town Hall event this week, featuring a guest presentation from Google on new security features coming up in Android 15, and a member presentation from SE Labs on their experiences developing XDR tests. To follow up this topic, AMTSO provided a brief overview of our ongoing XDR project and the surveys we are running to gather product and test information, covered in more detail below. The full call recording and most slide decks have been made available to AMTSO members only via the member website, edited highlights are being posted to our public site and YouTube channel.
We also opened registrations this week for our next in-person event, being held in Dublin in late September/early October. A number of members have already registered to attend the meetings and we look forward to seeing many members and guests in person. The meeting will feature discussion of many of our current projects, including testing guidance for XDR, VPNs and Sandbox evaluation. The event will be held ahead of the VB2024 conference being held in the same venue later the same week. Day two of the meeting will be open to guest attendees and speakers, any non-members interested in attending and sharing their thoughts and insights, especially on our key ongoing projects, are welcome to contact [email protected] for more information and to request an invite to attend.
XDR Working Group
We continue to gather intel on XDR solutions, any members active in the space are strongly encouraged to provide us with details of what their offerings comprise of and how various features are delivered. We aim to pull together the available data at the next team meeting on July 17th, and we’ll be collecting publicly available information for any significant products whose owners do not provide their data directly; as this will inevitably introduce some uncertainty and possibly inaccuracies, it is in everyone’s interest to have the form filled out directly by product makers/vendors. The simple survey form is here: https://members.amtso.org/amtso-xdr-component-tracking/
RTTL Working Group
The RTTL dev team is working on the latest batch of bug-fixes and improvements, which we hope to have fully implemented and ready for review by the working group at their next meeting next week. Further members have signed up to the system in the last few weeks and we expect to see their feeds coming online shortly. We continue to seek more participants for the new ThreatList system, those interested in taking part and contributing their intel for tests and certifications can find more details and a sign-up form here: https://www.amtso.org/threatlist/
Sandbox Evaluation Working Group
Our sandbox paper has been through initial review by those signed up to the Working Group, and is now available to members for wider review and feedback. We will also be seeking input from non-members active in the space prior to putting the paper forward for formal adoption as an official AMTSO guideline. We will hold another call of the Working Group in the next few weeks to start discussing any comments received. Once the paper is finalized, the next steps are likely to include developing guidance on creation of tailored samples sets for evaluation purposes.
VPN Working Group
We continue to sign up participants for our new VPN guidance/standard project, with more members being added to the new working group, which should hold its launch meeting shortly. Any members interested in participating in the project should contact AMTSO to join the group.
Board and Management
Our new Board took the reins this week with the start of our new company year, we welcomed new directors Jamz Yaneza of Trend Micro and Stefan Dumitrascu of SE Labs. The first meeting of the new team will be held in mid-July, and planning work for Board and team events alongside our Dublin meeting in September is under way.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
New tests added to our Test Calendar in recent weeks include a raft of regular test updates from Virus Bulletin, AppEsteem, and others, as well as several highly focused tests from AV-Comparatives. We also noted the latest round of VBSpam data from VB, with the next round due in Q3 now being run under the AMTSO Standard. Here’s a summary of activities from our Standard compliance team:
- An AMTSO Compliance Confirmation Report covering the results through May 2024 in the AppEsteem UwS Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP108) was issued on Thursday, June 27th, 2024.
- An AMTSO Compliance Confirmation Report covering the AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation’s May 2024 Advanced “In the Wild” Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP116) was issued on Thursday, June 27th, 2024.
- An AMTSO Compliance Confirmation Report covering the AV-Test Android Consumer 2024 Test Series, March-April 2024 component (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP103) was issued on Monday, July 1st, 2024.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection covering the results AV-Test Android Consumer 2024 Test Series, May-June 2024 component (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP103) will commence next week.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Membership
Updates are being made to our membership as we move into a new member year, one significant change being the new membership of Gen Digital, representing multiple global brands including previously separate members Avast, AVG, and Norton. Welcome all at Gen!
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
We send this newsletter to all AMTSO member representatives, as well as non-members who have engaged with AMTSO recently and have an interest in what’s going on in the AMTSO community. If you have any friends or colleagues who would like to be kept informed of developments in the testing world, they can sign up here. If you’d like to know more about joining the AMTSO community, there’s information and an application form here.