… people have been asking me about Google’s interesting paper on Trends in Circumventing Web-Malware Detection…

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

It's been a busy few weeks. Last week I was in Krems, Austria for the EICAR conference. The week before, I was in Prague for the CARO workshop (where my colleagues Robert Lipovsky, Alexandr Matrosov and Dmitry Volkov did a great presentation on "Cybercrime in Russia: Trends and issues" – more information on that shortly),

…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.

Here are a few papers and articles that have become available in the last week or two.

All this is potentially frightening and inconvenient (or worse) for a home user. And if it happens in a corporate environment, it can be very, very expensive to remedy. So while some of the public comments we see in the wake of such incidents may seem over the top, “FP rage” is certainly understandable.

Who would have thought that an initiative aimed at increasing the accuracy and relevance of anti-malware testing would be quite so controversial? Well, it was to be expected that AMTSO (the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) would generate a certain amount of controversy: clearly, the organization is not going to get everything right first time. And

…Somewhere in this welter of misinformation, well-meant but muddled thinking, and black propaganda, there are some issues that need clarifying… Watch this space for further information. And while you’re waiting, you might want to check the documentation and other resources at the AMTSO web site to see what the organization really proposes and what it is really trying to achieve…