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 presentation from SecureIQLab on CDR Testing, new member Artifact Security on their testing plans, and AMTSO on our RTTL sample- and threat-intel-sharing system. A full recording has been made available to members and edited highlights will be posted shortly to the event page.
Planning for our reception event in San Francisco on April 29th continues, we are pleased to add Jon Baker, director and co-founder of MITRE’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense, to the list of special guests taking part in our panel discussion. Details of all guest speakers are on the event page, along with the sign-up form – the guest list continues to fill up rapidly and members planning to attend are urged to sign up as soon as possible.
We will also be holding an official member meeting online on May 14th, featuring our regular Board election hustings alongside the usual updates from AMTSO. The next Testing Town Hall is scheduled for July 2nd.
Working Groups
Our Sandbox Evaluation Framework is going through the formal adoption process, AMTSO members have until the end of Tuesday, March 25th, to register any objections to approving the paper. Assuming no objections are lodged, the framework document will be officially published next week and promoted to potential testers, vendors, and users who will benefit from its flexible, use-case-based approach to measuring the quality of sandbox technologies. We expect to see initial trial tests under way shortly, and hope to have a review of the framework and possibly some initial results at our next Testing Town Hall in July.
Our VPN group is pivoting to a wider scope after the publication of the first VPN testing guidance paper last month, focusing more widely on testing protections against web-based threats including phishing, scams, and privacy risks. The group is seeking more participation from across the membership, any members interested in participating in this expanded project should contact AMTSO for more information.
Our XDR project has soft-launched its first output in the form of our XDR product comparison data, showing at a glance the composition of various XDR solutions and platforms and the options available to potential implementors. We expect to add data on more vendors/platforms in the near future, and continue to work with those already included to ensure the data we hold is accurate and up-to-date. Similar data on test coverage is also planned.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Tests recently added to our test calendar include the first 2025 reports from many of our regular series tests, including Virus Bulletin’s VB100, AppEsteem’s Unwanted Software Handling certification, and AV-Test’s regular Android test. We also posted the final 2024 reports from MRG Effitas, and compliance confirmation work on all these is under way.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection completes on Friday, March 21st, 2025 for the MRG-Effitas Q4’2024 Android Efficacy Assessment Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP132) and the Q4’2024 360-Degree Endpoint Assessment and Certification Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP133). Compliance Confirmation Reports will be issued by the close of business for both programs.
- Five Public Test Notifications were issued for the 2025 AV-Test programs including their Android Consumer Product Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP144), MacOS Business Product Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP145), MacOS Consumer Product Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP146), Windows Business Product Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP147), and Windows Consumer Product Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP148). Phase 1 Commentary Collection on all of these programs is now available through the usual web site : https://members.amtso.org/amtso-standards-phase-1-commentary-submission/
- Two Public Test Notifications were issued by MRG-Effitas for their Q1’2025 360 Degree Android Assessment and Certification (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP142) and their Q1’2025 360 Degree Assessment and Certification (Endpoint) (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP143). Phase 1 Commentary Collection is now available.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Board and management
As announced in the last newsletter, candidate nominations are now open for our annual Board elections, with four positions up for vote (two by tester members and two by non-tester members). The deadline for nominations is April 21st (12 noon Pacific time), any members interested in running for a seat on our Board should contact AMTSO for more information or to register their candidacy.
Membership
We welcome our newest member, Artifact Security. A detailed overview of the new company’s testing plans was included in this week’s Testing Town Hall event, and a recording can be found on the event page.
Anyone interested in joining AMTSO and participating in our various projects can find more information here.
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.