Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
Planning for our upcoming event in San Francisco continues, and we hope to release venue details and information on special guests very shortly. Once the venue is confirmed we will commence outreach to the long list of former AMTSO team and board members who have contributed to our efforts over the years, we hope to see some familiar faces at the event alongside many new ones.
Our Testing Town Hall event planned for next week has been postponed into March for scheduling reasons, we expect to publish the speaker list and issue invites in a few weeks’ time.
VPN Working Group
Our first VPN paper is now finalized and currently going through the approval process, barring any objections from members it will be officially adopted and published in the next few weeks. The VPN Working Group held a call last week to start work on the next phase, looking at more general web security and privacy features, and the group is considering expanding its remit to discuss such features in a wider range of packages. Outreach to prospective additional group members is under way.
Sandbox Evaluation Working Group
Work continues on wrapping up our Sandbox Evaluation Framework paper, which is going through a last few rounds of review and polishing and should move forward to the final stages of member/public review and adoption approval very soon. We hope to see some trial tests making use of the framework as we move into Q2 of the year.
XDR Working Group
Discussions with XDR vendors continue as we work to verify the information gathered on product composition and options, with development of a presentation format running in parallel. As part of this process we are working to expand group membership to ensure a wide range of viewpoints as we move on to developing formal testing criteria and guidance.
RTTL Working Group
Our RTTL team held their regular update call this week, with a number of technical improvements coming online very shortly and outreach to CERTs and other bodies who may benefit from using the system as a central sharing point continuing. The system admins are working on pulling out useful data to provide insights into the quality and value of the feeds to share with members and others in the near future.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Recent additions to our Test Calendar include the final 2024 Windows reports from AV-Test, we expect to re-issue their test plans for 2025 very soon. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection was completed for both AV-TEST November and December 2024 Windows 10 Virus Protection Test Report for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP106) and the AV-TEST November and December 2024 Windows 10 Virus Protection Test Report for Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP107). Compliance Confirmation Reports were issued for both on Tuesday, February 4th, 2025. These reports were the final reports to be issued covering these 2024 test series.
- A Compliance Confirmation Report was issued covering the AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation November 2024 Advanced In-the-Wild Malware Test (AMTSO-LS1-TP129) on Friday, January 24th, 2025.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Board and Management
Our next Board call will be held in two weeks’ time, items up for discussion include the schedule for our upcoming Board elections and online member meeting planned for mid-May, as well as consultation with members of our Advisory Board.
Promotion and Outreach
This week we published the latest in our series of interviews with member representatives, featuring Jan Miller of OPSWAT, lead author on our Sandbox Evaluation Framework project.
From the next edition of this newsletter we plan we circulate our regular updates via our comms service Brevo, as part of this transition we will be updating our lists of contacts, if you want to ensure you continue to receive our newsletters you can confirm your interest using the sign-up link below.
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