Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We have another Testing Town Hall call coming up on July 2nd, with the agenda including a presentation from Google on Android security and an update on the progress of our Sandbox Evaluation project from project lead Jan Miller, among other topics. Invites will be going out to members and signed-up guests in the next few days.
Planning continues for our next in-person event, with a survey gathering member preferences still open via the member website.
Board and Management
Voting closed earlier this week in our annual Board elections, and the results have been checked and confirmed. Elected by our non-tester members are long-time director and current Chair Luis Corrons of Gen and new director Jan Miller of OPSWAT. On the tester member side, Erik Heyland of AV-Test will be joining the Board, alongside David Ellis of SecureIQLab. Congratulations to those elected, we look forward to the benefits of your insights and expertise on our leadership team.
Last week we held our May meeting of the Board with added input from members of our Advisory Board. Topics covered included meeting plans a future areas of focus for the organization. The next meeting is scheduled for later in June and will include the incoming directors for a taster of how we run things. Their terms officially start on July 1st.
Working Groups
We held a special scoping call this week under the banner of our New Frontiers group, discussing a range of ideas and suggestions for new projects, including in the areas of threat intel and AI. Debate was highly productive and the group will meet again to continue planning in two weeks’ time, any members interested in participating in the planning process are welcome to sign up to the group and join the calls.
We also held a launch call for our newly re-focused Real World Testing group, evolving from our VPN team and looking at how to evaluate protections against phishing, scams and other web-borne threats. Several testing scenarios have already been identified and documented, with drafts shared with tester members, and further expansion of this scenario library will be the group’s initial primary focus.
Our RTTL team held a call last week, looking at planned new features including machine learning-based analysis of submitted samples to determine likelihood of malicious functions. Outreach to several members working on joining the feed system is underway, and potential new participants within and beyond the AMTSO membership are welcome to find out more and sign up via the RTTL page.
Also last week was an update call for our Sandbox Evaluation project, tracking the progress of ongoing trial tests using our new framework. We should have public updates on this topic at our upcoming Testing Town Hall.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Recent updates to our Test Calendar include AV-Test‘s latest sets of Windows 11 test data covering both consumer and business products, and Q1 reports from MRG Effitas on both Windows and Android. Coming up later in June we expect to see regular updates from AppEsteem, SE Labs, and Testing Ground Labs, plus another VBSpam report from Virus Bulletin. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- AMTSO Compliance Confirmation has been issued for the AV-Test March 2025 Virus Protection Test Report covering MacOS for Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP146) as part of their 2025 Test Series on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025.
- AMTSO Compliance Confirmation has been issued for the AV-Test March 2025 Virus Protection Test Report covering MacOS for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP145) as part of their 2025 Test Series on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collections covering the March/April 2025 Windows 11 Virus Protection Test Report for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP147) and March/April 2025 Windows 11 Virus Protection Test Report for Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP148) are now active through Tuesday, June 10th, 2025.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collections covering the MRG-Effitas Q1’2025 360-Degree Endpoint Assessment and Certification Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP143) and the MRG-Effitas Q1’2025 Android Efficacy Assessment Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP142) are now active through Thursday, June 12th, 2025.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Membership
We continue to work on our renewals process as we lead up to our new membership year on July 1st, any members with issues should reach out to AMTSO for assistance. We are in discussions with several potential new members and look forward to further expansion as we head into our 2025-26 member year.
Anyone interested in becoming an AMTSO member and contributing their insights to our various projects can find more information on our joining page.
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.