New interesting moves from AMTSO during the last meeting in Munich, Germany

This is a copy from the original posting at the G Data Security Blog.

G Data is one of the members of AMTSO (www.amtso.org), an organisation currently comprised of 37 members, representing testers, vendors, academics and publishers involved in anti-malware research. Last week I was at the last AMTSO members’ meeting which was held in Munich. As always, a lot of work was done during the workshops.

First of all, some guidelines about testing for false positives (FP) were adopted. The False Positive issue is a common problem and the security industry dedicates a lot of resources to ensuring the highest quality and to reduce False Positives heavily. We welcome the new joint guidelines related to testing of false positives and we are hoping that in the light provided by these new guidelines, the FPs from all security products will be much more fairly assessed. The new documents can be found at www.amtso.org/documents.html.

Another important development is the introduction of AMTSO subscriptions. This will allow just everybody to participate in the AMTSO discussions for testing practices in security software. AMTSO was striving to have an open character from the very beginning and by giving access to the documents during the draft stages I think this openness will be a fact. Subscriptions will only cost about 20 Euros/year compared to 2000 Euros/year for full voting members and will allow many more voices to be heard. The logistics for subscriptions will be put in place by the end of 2010.

 G Data continues to take an active part in AMTSO work because we believe that cooperation within the security industry is extremely important. We encourage all people interested in improving the quality of security products to consider taking an AMTSO subscription when www.amtso.org starts taking them. All testers and magazines can now participate and discuss the documents in detail with the other members. In my opinion, a must for everyone who is interested in this subject.