Welcome to our regular roundup of events and activities in and around AMTSO.
Meetings and Events
We’re not much over a month out from our October Cyber Research Conference in Brussels, and final preparations are being made. We’ve added some last-minute talks to the agenda, which is now almost complete, and we advise anyone wishing to attend to register and book in as soon as possible. Our Working Groups are working on what they will be sharing with our members and guests at the event, alongside presentations on a wide range of topics and panel discussions. Registration and full details of the event can be found on the event page, members can sign up via the AMTSO member site.
If you can’t make it to Brussels, AMTSO will also be present at the 2026 Virus Bulletin conference in Seville, also in October – if you’re there, do drop by our booth to say hello!
Guidelines and Working Groups
We have another guideline paper very close to final adoption, with the member approval stage of our “Testing Application Promises” paper coming to a close on Monday, September 21st. With no objections so far we expect to officially publish next week, and already have the first test plan for a test leveraging the guidance under review and ready to go live – assuming no last-minute hold-ups to the guidelines, that will also be published next week.
As noted above, most of our project teams have been focused on preparations for the Brussels event. We held a call last week for Multiscanner certification project, checking in on the progress and uptake of the new certification and pulling together some discussion points for the meeting; likewise our AI security group met last week to celebrate the successful publication of their first guideline document and to look ahead to Brussels and future work for the group. This week we caught up with our RTTL threat-intel sharing project team, carrying out routine oversight of the current flow of data in the system and discussing the progress of major new features planned for the next version. Next week we will hold meetings for our Scam & Phishing testing group, with several tests backed by our guidance in the area coming out recently or very soon, and our Sandbox group will also hold a call to map out their next steps.
AMTSO Standard and Test Calendar
Recent additions to our Test Calendar include the latest VBSpam email security testing report from Virus Bulletin, Android and MacOS updates from AV-Test, and the first components of the long-awaited scam & phishing testing from Artifact Security. 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 2026 Zero-Day AV/EDR Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP214) on Thursday, September 10th, 2026.
- A Compliance Report was issued covering the SecureIQLab Cloud WAAP V5.0 CyberRisk Validation Test (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS-TP169) on Tuesday, September 15th, 2026.
- A Compliance Report was issued covering the AV-TEST Android Consumer 2026 Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP184) as part of their annual Test Series on Tuesday, September 8th, 2026.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection covering the Virus Bulletin Q3’2026 VBSpam Test Report (AMTSO Test ID: AMTSO-LS1-TP207) will close on Monday, September 21st, 2026.
- Phase 2 Commentary Collection covering the Artifact Security H1’2026 Scam and Phishing Evaluation (AMTSO Test ID : AMTSO-LS-TP171) is scheduled to begin during the week of Monday, September 21st, 2026.
Information on all published and upcoming tests being tracked by AMTSO can be found in our Test Calendar.
Board and Management
The next meeting of our Board of Directors will be held next week, with plans for Brussels high on the agenda. We will also be holding an in-person team get-together in Brussels ahead of the main event.
Membership
We continue to work on new memberships with several potential new joins in discussions, and we look forward to meeting with more likely joiners at the upcoming in-person events. 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.