AMTSO meets again to discuss better testing

Further documents developed at Cupertino meeting.

This week has seen another meeting of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization, AMTSO, hosted by security giant Symantec in its HQ town of Cupertino, California. The meeting was attended as usual by representatives of most of the major industry players and numerous testing bodies, as well as representatives from the worlds of academia and publishing.

The meeting covered a range matters, including the formation of a board of advisors for the group, the adoption of a new logo, the setting up of a review process to debate the quality of tests, and further work on several documents first proposed and discussed in the previous meeting, which took place in Oxford, UK last October.

Topics covered included gathering and handling malicious samples, the ethics of creating new samples, and how to properly test the full range of functionality in products, with a separate document covering 'in-the-cloud' technologies. These latest documents will support the official guidelines already ratified and published by the body, the central principles of testing and a best-practices document on running dynamic testing, both ratified at the Oxford meeting.

VB representatives were unable to attend the meeting, but played an active role in the creation of the in-the-cloud document, and look forward to helping get these latest documents finalized at the next meeting, which is due to take place in Budapest in early May.

More details on the meeting are blogged by AMTSO board member Stuart Taylor on the SophosLabs blog here and advisory board member Neil J. Rubenking here and here.

04 February 2009

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