It has happened before, it just happened again and it will happen in the future. It is inevitable! Some company that needs to get some press coverage or public visibility will release yet another statement on how worthless Anti-Virus is, based on its own dysfunctional test. For this “test”, they used the VirusTotal service. VirusTotal

AMTSO’s discussions on its own new directions, and updates to its testing-related resources.

A new conference paper discusses whether AMTSO has the credibility to achieve its aims of raising testing standards on its own.

The paper by Julio Canto and myself on the use and misuse of multi-scanner malware-checking resources like VirusTotal is now available.

The slides from an AMTSO-oriented presentation by Larry Bridwell and myself at this year's Virus Bulletin conference, on "'Daze of whine and neuroses (but testing is FINE)" are now available on the Virus Bulletin site are now available here (along with some other excellent presentations). The paper on which the presentation is based is on the ESET white papers

Aryeh Goretsky interviewed, as his paper on Possibly Unwanted Applications is published.

…AMTSO’s members have approved a document that offers guidelines to vendors on ways in which they can make it easier to test products accurately….

“Test Files and Product Evaluation: the Case for and against Malware Simulation” is a paper presented at the recent AVAR conference by Eddy Willems, Lysa Myers and myself: we were all at the EICAR conference and figured that it was a good moment to combine our experience of testing, EICAR, AMTSO and the anti-malware industry to cover the developments that had taken place since Sarah’s paper.

By kind permission of Virus Bulletin, we’ve already put two of the papers written or co-authored by ESET researchers up on the White Papers page.

No-one believes that AMTSO has all the answers and can “fix” testing all by itself, but it has compiled and generated resources that have made good testing practice far more practicable and understandable. The way for testers (and others) to improve those resources is by talking to and working with AMTSO in a spirit of co-operation: the need for transparency is not going to go away.