AMTSO News 2024-05-24

Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO. 

Meetings and Events

We held our member meeting last week, covering updates on everything AMTSO has been doing in recent months. There were detailed reports on the RTTL and ThreatList projects, as well as our other working groups, and plans to launch several new groups were also discussed. The meeting concluded with our usual Board election hustings, with candidates given a chance to address the members. The next member meeting will be in Dublin in late September.

Our next Testing Town Hall will be held on July 3rd, speakers from Google and SE Labs are confirmed and we hope to lock in a third presenter shortly. Invites will be issued to members and guests in the next few weeks.

Board and Management

Our members continue to vote in our annual Board elections. Candidates had a chance to introduce themselves and field questions during the member meeting, and voting remains open until June 3rd. Members are advised to ensure they submit their votes by the deadline. There will be a call of the Board next week, and new Board members will be invited to join the July call as a taster of their new roles.

RTTL Working Group

Our RTTL group’s regular call was not held last week due to the member meeting, but the usual review of feed levels was performed and the team will meet again next week for an update. Several new participants were added to the project, and some new ThreatList contributors also signed up. A notice of an expected brief outage has been issued to participants in the system, due to planned maintenance by the hosting provider.

XDR Working Group

The XDR team held a call this week, with component surveys now issued to many vendor members with more being contacted. Several test labs are also working on their version of the survey, and we hope to have some initial data to review at the next call in two weeks’ time.

Sandbox Evaluation Working Group

A new project team has been set up to develop our sandbox evaluation guidelines, and potential tools, with the opening call for the group scheduled for next week. An initial draft paper has been circulated to the group members, who include several vendors providing their own sandbox solutions as well as testers. Outreach to non-members active in the space will begin after the initial development stages.

VPN Working Group

We are also setting up a new group to produce guidance on testing VPNs, which will hold its first call in the next few weeks. Any members interested in participating are invited to sign up to the new group; we will also be consulting with VPN providers outside the AMTSO membership after the initial internal phases, any VPN makers who would like to contribute their ideas should get in touch via [email protected].

AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar

Recent updates to our test calendar included the recently-published MacOS tests from AV-Test detailed below, and several new tests from AV-Comparatives including analysis of self-protective measures in business solutions. Here’s a summary of activities from our Standard compliance team:

  • Phase 2 Commentary Collection for the AV-TEST March 2024 MacOS Sonoma for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP104) was launched on Wednesday, May 22nd, 2024 and will close on Thursday, May 30th, 2024.  The corresponding Compliance Report will be issued at that time.
  • Phase 2 Commentary Collection for the AV-TEST March 2024 MacOS Sonoma for Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP105) is underway using the same date range as the Business Users report.
  • A revised and simplified version of the Phase 2 Commentary Collection form has been launched.  Members and non-members can view the collected details at the following link: https://members.amtso.org/amtso-standards-phase-2-commentary-submission/
  • Note that all assets including Final Test Reports covering the SecureIQLab Cloud WAF test (AMTSO Test ID : AMTSO-LS1-TP097) have now been published by the tester.

Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.

Membership

Members are reminded that invoices for renewal fees have been issued and payments are due by the end of June, ahead of the start of our new membership year on July 1st. Prompt payments or confirmations of intent to pay help AMTSO plan accurate budgets, so members are requested to ensure they arrange their payments by the due date.

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.