Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We’ve announced the venue for our October “Cyber Research Conference” in Lisbon – it will be held at the Altis Grand Hotel in the heart of the city. Details have been posted to the event page, including how to book accommodation at a special rate for attendees. Registration for the conference is open and the call for papers is also still available – if you have something you’d like to present at the event, make sure you submit ASAP, and if you plan to attend please book in as early as possible as space is limited. There are also sponsorship options available, if you’re interested in partnering with our event you’ll find details on the event page.
An initial agenda outline for the event is also available on the main event page, we will be updating it shortly to add in many of the early presentation and discussion topics already submitted.
The next event after that will be our Testing Town Hall in November, we hope to have the first speakers signed up shortly and will update the event page as soon as we have the confirmations.
Working Groups
As we head into summer breaks our working groups are continuing their work and regular call schedules will be maintained with somewhat reduced attendance expected, all will be back to full operation from the start of September. We have reserved space for each active group to hold an in-person meetup during our Lisbon event in October.
We presented an overview of our Sandbox Evaluation Framework as part of last week’s SANS DFIR Summit, receiving much positive feedback from attendees. The group continues to work to gather enough test data to build out comparative visualizations, and to look into the next steps for the project including a testing harness and data hosting platform.
Our RTTL Threat Intel team held their regular review call last week. The main items for discussion alongside the usual monitoring of the system were review of new processes for alerting when unsuitable samples are submitted, and ideas to automate other alert processes. Several members have recently signed up to the system and work is under way to get their feeds up and running.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
In a quiet few weeks for testing, recent additions to our Test Calendar include the latest reports from regular series tests including Virus Bulletin’s VB100 and Testing Ground Labs’ bi-monthly Android testing, as well as the May/June Windows results from AV-Test. Coming up in August we expect to see Q2 data from MRG Effitas and SE Labs, alongside further updates from the monthly and bi-monthly series tests. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- Phase 2 Commentary was launched on Monday, July 28th, 2025 for the Testing Ground Labs June 2025 Consumer Android Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP155). The feedback window closes on Monday, August 4th, 2025.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection completed on Monday, July 28th, 2025 for the Virus Bulletin April-July 2025 VB100 Test Reports (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP134). A Compliance Confirmation Report for this test has now been issued.
- A Public Test Renotification was issued on behalf of Virus Bulletin for their Q3 2025 VBSpam Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP157) on Monday, July 28th, 2025, noting minor changes in the procedure for calculating the spam catch rate.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Board and Management
With summer breaks approaching our next meeting of the Board will be held in early September. We continue to seek a new Chief Marketing Officer to help promote AMTSO and our activities – anyone interested in volunteering for the position can find more information on the member website or by contacting us at info@amtso.org.
Membership
We are in discussions with several potential new members and hope to add them to our membership lists soon. 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.