Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Board and Management
Co-chair of our Board of Directors and long-standing supporter of AMTSO Simon Edwards has announced his standing down from the AMTSO Board. Simon has been a key part of the AMTSO team since the foundation of the organization, initially representing Dennis Technology Labs before founding his own company SE Labs. We thank him for his many years of diligent and intelligent input.
Our annual Board elections remain open for candidate nominations until April 22nd. Any member representatives wanting to take part in the elections should contact AMTSO ahead of the cutoff date. Voting information will be circulated to members on the opening of voting on May 8th.
Meetings and Events
Last week AMTSO was represented at SE Labs’ “The-C2” event in London, hearing some fascinating talks and discussions in an impressive venue and networking with security experts from a wide variety of fields. Our congratulations to SE Labs for putting on an excellent event.
Our next member meeting will be held next month, on Wednesday May 15th. There will be updates on our various working groups and projects, reports on our RTTL and ThreatList sample-sharing systems, discussion of plans for future projects, and our annual Board election hustings. Details will be circulated to members in the next few weeks.
Our planned Testing Town Hall event on April 10th has been cancelled due to issues with planned speakers. The next Town Hall will be held on July 3rd, where we hope to have an update from Google on their Android security plans, alongside other topics. Anyone interested in addressing our members and guests at one of our online events is welcome to contact AMTSO for more details. Non-members can sign up to attend our events here: https://www.amtso.org/amtso-event-registration/
RTTL and ThreatList
We held our usual team call this week to review the status of our sample-sharing and threat intel systems. The group initiated a review of the interface design to better accommodate information on the 15 main regular contributors and their contributions to the system, alongside others from outside the AMTSO membership, as well as reviewing how the system handles old and expired data and samples.
XDR Testing Criteria
Our XDR team will begin circulating trial versions of our data-gathering forms shortly, aiming to build an overview of components included in XDR-type solutions and to provide similar insight into what is covered by tests of such solutions. Once we have gathered some initial feedback from the initial group of testers and vendors this will be used to refine the forms for final release, and to guide the next steps of building out criteria and guidelines for testing.
Other Working Group plans
We continue to seek participants for our planned Sandbox Evaluation project, and are looking at opening new guidelines projects focusing on VPN testing and testing of anti-scam measures, among others. These will all be discussed in detail at our member meeting next month, but any members interested in signing up to one or more of these projects from the outset is requested to get in touch with AMTSO for more details.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Here’s a summary of activities from our Standard compliance team:
- Phase 2 Commentary collection covering the Testing Ground Labs (TGL) February 2024 Consumer Android Malware Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP110) launched and will remain open through Tuesday, April 8th, 2024.
- Phase 2 Commentary collection for the SecureIQLabs Test Reports from their Q4’23-Q1’24 Cloud-WAF CyberRisk Tests (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP097) is underway through Wednesday, April 10th, 2024.
- Phase 2 Commentary collection the AV-Test Windows Business and Consumer January/February 2024 test cycles (AMTSO Test IDs: AMTSO-LS1-TP106 and AMTSO-LS1-TP106) is underway through Thursday, April 11th, 2024.
- Compliance confirmation analysis covering the AV-TEST January/February 2024 Android Consumer Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP103) has now completed and the test has NOT been confirmed compliant with the AMTSO Standard. Work with the test lab to rectify missing links to the AMTSO compliance information, and to clarify language in the Test Plan regarding access to disputes, is ongoing.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Member website
Work to improve and expand our members-only website continues with more changes being made in the background to facilitate some new features, particularly in automation of our Standard commentary gathering system and other forms. More visible changes will be appearing soon, including a new orientation area to help new members settle in and find their way around AMTSO’s various offerings.
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.