Anti-Malware Group Formed

You can be forgiven for never having heard of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO). After all, it only opened its door yesterday. But the players who’ve formed the body will be instantly familiar – Microsoft, AVG, McAfee and Symantec, among a total of 40 companies.

 

According to its website, the formation of the group was driven by “industry-wide concern about the increasing mismatch between what anti-malware technologies actually do, and the testing methodologies used to evaluate them. As anti-malware solutions become more complex, many existing tests are unable to evaluate product effectiveness properly, resulting in product reviews that are sometimes incomplete, inaccurate and misleading.”

 

The germ of the idea came during the International Antivirus Testing Workshop in Reykjavik, Iceland, in May 2007, and developed further during the Antivirus Asia Researchers Conference in Seoul, South Korea last December.

 

Coming together at a meeting in Bilbao, Spain, the group has pledged to help “improve the objectivity, quality and relevance of anti-malware technology testing. AMTSO membership is open to industry-wide academics, reviewers, testers and vendors.”

 

But will it stop those phishing e-mails? Time will tell.