Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
Our AMTSO Cyber Research Conference in Lisbon last week was a great success – 45+ delegates enjoyed some brilliant presentations and lively discussion sessions in ideal surroundings, with a splendid venue and excellent staging complemented by superb weather (and some delicious food).
We’ve shared recordings and most slide decks with members via the member site, and will be posting edited highlights publicly over the next few weeks, starting with the opening talk from Alexander Adamov of NioGuard Security Lab on “Rethinking AV Testing in the Age of AI“.
Resulting from the discussion we are planning several new projects and expanding some of our existing ones, and we are also making a start planning for the next in-person event – we hope to announce dates and venue by the end of the year.
The next event on our schedule is another Testing Town Hall online event in mid-November, we will be putting out some details of that in the next week or so.
Working Groups
There were presentations and discussions covering all our active projects at the Lisbon event last week, we had a special focus on the RTTL Threat Intel sharing project with several talks and a lengthy debate looking at the future of the project and how it can be expanded and improved. We will be extending our regular team calls to work on the new ideas generated and start implementing new features and processes.
Our Scam & Phishing testing project also had a dedicated session, looking at how new technolgies for protecting against scams can be tested and evaluated. Several more members signed up to join the group, which will be holding a re-launch call next week to map out plans. Any other members interested in participating are invited to sign up to join the group.
Our sandbox project was also discussed, with many of the ideas merging into the work of the RTTL project, we also saw interest from testing labs in taking on the difficult taks of sandbox evaluation with the framework as a guide and we hope to be able to start populating our result visualization system very soon. The working group will continue to meet to evolve the project.
Several new projects were proposed and discussed in Lisbon, the first to take shape is an effort to product clear criteria for testing of products for acceptance into multi-scanner platforms. A launch call for this project has been scheduled for next week, again any members keen to contribute are welcome to join, you can do so by contacting AMTSO for more information.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
We had some issues with our Test Calendar last week due to issues with some of the software powering the system, but things were quickly rectified and we’re keeping a close eye for further glitches. Recent additions to our Calendar include the first published test (looking at scam and phishing protections) from our newest test-lab member Artifact Security, alongside regulars including AV-Test’s latest endurance test and Android reports from Testing Ground Labs. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf of Venak Security for their Q4 2025 Zero-Day EDR Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP165) on Thursday, October 2nd, 2025 with Phase 1 Commentary welcomed.
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf of Virus Bulletin (VB) for their upcoming Q4’2025 VBSpam Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP166) on Friday, October 10th, 2025 with Phase 1 Commentary welcomed.
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf of TGL (Testing Ground Labs) for their upcoming October 2025 Consumer Android Malware Detection Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP167) on Tuesday, October 14th, 2025 with Phase 1 Commentary welcomed.
- Phase 2 Commentary collections have been initiated for the Testing Ground Labs (TGL) August 2025 Consumer Android Malware Detection Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP160) and Enterprise Android Malware Detection Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP161), closing on Thursday, October 23rd, 2025.
- Phase 2 Commentary collections have been initiated for the Artifact Security August 2025 Spam and Phishing Evaluation Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP159), closing on Wednesday, October 29th, 2025.
- Phase 2 Commentary collection covering the AVLab Cybersecurity Institute’s September 2025 Advanced In-the-Wild Malware Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP138) is scheduled to begin on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025.
- Compliance Confirmation Reports covering AV-TEST’s July/August Virus Protection Test Report covering Windows 11 for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP147) and Windows 11 for Consumer Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP148) were issued on Tuesday, October 7th, 2025.
- Compliance Confirmation Reports covering SE Labs Q2’2025 Endpoint Tests for Enterprise, SMB, and Consumer (AMTSO-LS1-TP149) and Q3’2025 Endpoint Tests for Enterprise, SMB, and Consumer (AMTSO-LS1-TP156) were released on Friday, October 17th, 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 full Board meeting ahead of our Lisbon event last week with the majority of the team present, discussions were wide and varied with a focus on preparing for the upcoming event, as well as mapping out some of the new projects discussed and launched during the conference. Our Board schedule will return to normal from next month with the next regular call set for November 18th.
Membership
We had several guest attendees at our Lisbon event and hope to have persuaded some of them to join our community – we expect to expand our member lists in the next couple of weeks. 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.