What do you get when you put 40+ AV and software security experts together in a room with testing organizations? It sounds like a bad joke, but it happened for the first couple of days this week in Bilbao, Spain. The event itself has the potential to have a very large positive impact on the state of anti-malware testing overall and the relevance and meaning of test data for all of its consumers — communications between vendors and testers, guidelines for tests, neutrality of the group enforced by academic members, and more.
The world’s largest and smallest software security vendors and testing groups are working together to create this non-profit coalition of vendors, testers and academics. The group will be called the AMTSO, or the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization. The overall goal will be for the coalition to take on all challenges related to anti-malware security software testing, improving all aspects of the process. It will be a large task to set up standards, and PC Tools is pleased to take part in this effort.
The event was formative in nature, establishing temporary committees for most of the sessions before breaking off into the beginnings of some discussion and debate over technical matters and details that will come up in future meetings. Dr. Igor Muttik of McAfee’s AVERT Labs posted detailed information of the proceedings, for those interested.
We will keep you updated on this ongoing effort to improve the state of anti-malware security software testing.
