Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Board and Management
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Stefan Dumitrascu of Artifact Security as AMTSO’s new President. Stefan will be familiar to most of our members, he has been involved with AMTSO for many years, is a regular speaker at our events, and has been part of our Board of Directors since 2024. He brings a wealth of testing experience to the position, previously with SE Labs and more recently with Artifact, which he founded last year, and we look forward to new ideas and new directions.
Stefan will replace current President Vlad Iliushin, who has driven major expansions in AMTSO’s work, including our Cyber Research Conference series starting with our hugely succesful Lisbon event in October last year (more below on the 2026 instalment). We hope to see Vlad continue to support our event planning and other efforts alongside his busy day job running Ellio. Stefan’s tenure will officially commence on February 1st.
Our next meeting of the Board in mid-February will include members of our Advisory Board, giving them a chance to hear from Stefan and provide input on our future plans.
Meetings and Events
Plans continue to develop for our 2026 Cyber Research Conference, which will be held in Brussels in October. We are in the final stages of venue selection with an announcement expected in the next few weeks, as soon as contracts are in place. Our Call for Papers continues to gather some great submissions, with the most highly-rated by our panel being confirmed early – these should also be announced shortly. Anyone interested in sharing their insights and ideas is encouraged to submit ASAP to ensure their place on the agenda. The CfP will close at the end of April.
We’re also mapping out our Testing Town Hall plans for 2026, with the first pushed back to April to accomodate the changed schedules of our new team. A date and initial lineup of talks will be published shortly, the event will include Q&A with our new President, a review of proposed expansions to our RTTL threat-intel sharing system, and a first look at draft plans from our Scam & Phishing and Multiscanner Working Groups (more below).
Working Groups
Our RTTL project team held a special extended meeting last week to nail down ideas for expansion and improvement plans. The proposed new system includes a number of new features and functions and will further extend the reach of the system beyond our members, while retaining the current system’s core principles and flexibility. Final drafting of the proposal outline is under way, and details will be shared with members ahead of discussion on the next Testing Town Hall call.
Our Multiscanner group met this week to move forward with design of our proposed system for validating solutions for inclusion in multi-engine systems, which are shaping up well and should also be ready for member review and debate shortly.
The first outputs from our Scam & Phishing Working Group are also due very soon. The team held a call this week, reviewing and further developing the draft guidance; with content-collection largely complete, we expect to finalise and share the draft after a last round of structuring and clean-up.
Our event planning team call this week focused on the final stages of venue selection, as well as looking over the latest submission to the call for papers, selecting those most suited for early acceptance. We expect to make a range of details available very soon. A range of sponsorship options will be available for the event including our “Friend of AMTSO” status, more information can be found on the event page.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Our Standards team continues to build out schedules for 2026, with the most recent releases including the first VB100 certifications of the year from Virus Bulletin, a report on ATP testing from AV-Test, and the first in a new line of consumer-level tests from MRG Effitas. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection covering the AV-TEST November and December 2025 Windows 11 Virus Protection Test Report for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP147) and Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP148) continues through Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
- Compliance Confirmation Reports covering the AV-TEST December 2025 Virus Protection Test Report MacOS for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP145) and Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP146) were issued on Thursday, January 22nd, 2026 following a Phase 2 Commentary Collection.
- A Compliance Confirmation Report covering the AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation Internet Banking Protection Test, 2026 Edition (AMTSO-LS1-TP168) was issued on Tuesday, January 20th, 2026 following a Phase 2 Commentary Collection.
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf of Artifact Security for their Ransomware Impact Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP183) on Thursday, January 22nd, 2026. Phase 1 Commentary is now open.
- A Public Test Notification was issued on behalf of Venak Security for their Q1 2026 Zero-Day EDR Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP182) on Friday, January 16th, 2026. Phase 1 Commentary is now open.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our test calendar.
Membership
We are in process of on-boarding a major new member and hope to announce details shortly; representatives of part of the company have already been added to our multiscanning working group and we expect to see them contribute significantly to the project as it nears completion.
We are also continuing to work on several other new memberships, including the potential transfer of an existing membership after an acquisition. Anyone interested in becoming an AMTSO member 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.