The next meeting of AMTSO (the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization) will be held in Munich on the 21st and 22nd October. Details of the venue, registration and so on are available on the AMTSO web page.

The preliminary Munich Meeting Agenda has also been published, That may look like the sort of dry heads-down- and-generate-some-useful-documents work that causes the media to yawn and ask what Conficker is doing these days, but that appearance could be deceptive. Some of the publicity of the last few months has seriously raised AMTSO's profile, but a lot of that publicity has been unremittingly hostile. It's not surprising that testers outside the organization are nervous about coming into AMTSO's sights and react defensively, though I'd like to think that AMTSO is more about co-operation than being the Test Police.

However, quite a few other issues have come up that are less obviously related to AMTSO's aims, and it's probably inevitable that some of those concerns will find their way out in the course of the meeting. Watch this space.

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
ESET Senior Research Fellow