Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We held our latest Testing Town Hall event last week, this time with a focus on AMTSO papers and projects with several reaching major milestones at the same time. We looked in depth at our newly-launched “Multiscanner Engine Quality Certification“, providing a detailed overview of how the scheme will operate. We also covered our Agentic AI Security Testing Guidelines and updates to our Sandbox Evaluation Framework, also focused on AI issues, which have both passed through their period of public feedback and are now in the final stage of member approval, scheduled to complete after summer breaks on September 1st. Finally, we reviewed a new proposed guideline on “testing app promises”, a somewhat different project for AMTSO as it takes a “horizontal” approach, providing guidance on testing a layer of interaction between users and product makers, rather than a specific type of product or protection. This new paper has been through member review and is now moving forward to public comment, officially opening on July 31st and also completing at the start of September.
Work continues on planning for our October Cyber Research Conference in Brussels, putting the final touches to the schedule with plans for the speaker and VIP dinner ahead of the event. The (almost-complete) agenda is available and registration for non-members is open (members can register via the member site), full details of the event can be found on the event page.
Working Groups
Many of our Working Groups celebrated milestones over the past few weeks, with most of them shared via our latest Testing Town Hall event – a full recording is available to members for review. Our AI Security group held a call this week to push on with next steps while members review the Agentic AI Security guidance paper, due to reach official adoption in early September; our Sandbox group is in a similar position with the latest updates to the Sandbox Evaluation Framework moving forwards towards adoption. Our Multiscanner group also held a call this week to check over the setup of its certification scheme in the wake of its official launch last week, we look forward to seeing the scheme adopted by multiscanning platforms to ensure engines qualilty. The RTTL team held its usual update call last week just ahead of the Testing Town Hall event, checking the status of the system while major updates remain in the pipeline. And of course, our exec team and event planning groups held their regular catch-ups to keep things moving forward. For most these will be the last meetings for a few weeks as we go into the summer break period, some will continue to hold short meetings over the break and all will resume full activities in early September.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Several updates were added to our Test Calendar in recent weeks, including a test of VPN technologies from Artifact Security, following our VPN testing guidelines, the latest Windows reports from AV-Test, updates on the VB100 certification from Virus Bulletin, and a business test from AV-Comparatives. Here’s a summary of recent activities from our Standard compliance team:
- A Compliance Report was issued covering the Virus Bulletin April-June VB100 Test Reports as part of their 2026 Test Series (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP174) on Tuesday, July 28th, 2026.
- A Compliance Report was issued covering the Artifact Security VPN Performance Evaluation Test – H1’2026 (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP201) on Tuesday, July 28th, 2026.
- A Compliance Report was issued covering the Venak Security Q2’2026 Sandbox Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP204) on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection covering the AV-TEST May-June 2026 Windows 11 Virus Protection Test Report for Business Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP187) and Home Users (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP188) is now open through Wednesday, August 5th, 2026.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our Test Calendar.
Board and Management
As we move into summer breaks our team calls will be suspended, resuming in early September; the next official Board meeting will be on September 8th.
Membership
We continue to gather our member renewal fees for the new 2026-27 member year, and to work on budgeting for the year ahead with our Brussles event being a major expenditure point. We look forward to seeing some new members joining us soon as well as to meeting many potential members in Brussels. 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.