Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We held our reception event in San Francisco this week, it was great to catch up with many AMTSO members, old friends, and long-lost contacts, and to meet many new people interested in AMTSO and testing. Our panel discussion, featuring guest speakers Jon Baker of MITRE, Eva Galperin of the EFF, and Sam Curry of Zscaler, covered all aspects of cooperation and collaboration across the security world in entertaining detail.
We also presented awards recognising the efforts of several AMTSO members – our former president Dennis Batchelder of AppEsteem picked up his previously-announced award for Outstanding Contribution in recognition of his long and impactful service to the organization, Jan Miller of OPSWAT was given a Guideline Champion award for his ongoing work on our Sandbox project, the efforts of Grayson Milbourne of Webroot on our threat intel platform were rewarded with the RTTL Champion prize, and David Ellis of SecureIQLab received an AMTSO Ambassador award recognising his work promoting and explaining the mission of our organization.
Alongside all this, the event featured lots of networking time with attendees enjoying the fine cuisine, spectacular atmosphere, and balcony views of the University Club. We plan to post some photos of the event to our LinkedIn feed shortly.
Coming up next on our event schedule is our online member meeting on May 14th, followed by a Testing Town Hall call on July 2nd, which we expect to feature an update on our Sandbox Evaluation Framework from OPSWAT and a look at developments in Android security from Google, alongside other topics.
Working Groups
Our RTTL team has been working on refining and confirming statistics on the system for a recent release, noting among other insights that 30% of samples in RTTL were seen there before any other sharing system, according to data analysis by several participants. The working group met again this week to monitor the status of the system and feeds, tracking a few minor performance issues.
Our Sandbox working group has continued the development of a structure to host and display testing data with flexible weightings, and topics of discussion on this week’s call included the applicability of the planned structure to other purposes including threat intel data.
Our VPN working group continues to morph into a wider online protection focus, with the initial draft direction shared with tester members for feedback and outreach to potential participants from the wider membership ongoing. The XDR group call this week was postponed
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Updates to our Test Calendar in recent weeks include the latest Android tests from AV-Test, an update on VB100 certifications, and a set of anti-tampering tests from AV-Comparatives. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection for the AppEsteem UwS 2025 Test Series (AMTSO Test ID : AMTSO-LS1-TP137) Q1 checkpoint was closed on Thursday, April 17th, 2025 and the corresponding Compliance Confirmation Report has been issued.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection completed for the AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation March Advanced “In the Wild” Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP138) as part of their 2025 Test Series. The Compliance Confirmation Report was issued on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025.
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf Virus Bulletin (VB) for their upcoming Q2’2025 VBSpam Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP150) on Friday, April 11th, 2025. The Phase 1 Commentary period remains open.
- Public Test Notifications were issued on behalf of Testing Ground Labs (TGL) on Monday, April 21st, 2025 covering their upcoming April 2025 Consumer Android Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP151) and April 2025 Business Android Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP152). Phase 1 Commentary is now open.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection for the Testing Ground Labs (TGL) February 2025 Consumer Android Malware Detection Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP141) closed on Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 and the corresponding Compliance Confirmation Report has been issued.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection for the AV-Test March 2025 Android Consumer Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP144, part of their annual Test Series) opened on Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 and will close on Tuesday, May 6th, 2025.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Board and Management
We held a meeting of the Board on April 22nd to review and confirm the candidate lists for our upcoming elections, with details communicated to members the following day. Other matters for Board review included the finalization of plans for our San Francisco event, and plans for in-person member meetings later in the year.
Membership
We met with several companies who expressed interest in joining AMTSO during our visit to San Francisco and the RSAC conference, we hope to see some new memberships coming very soon. Existing members are reminded that invoicing for renewal of memberships for the 2025-26 member year will be going on in the next few weeks, and we request that members ensure their finance contacts and other details are up to date – info can be provided via the member website or by email.
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.