Testing the WATeR

As it happens, I wasn’t at the most recent AMTSO meeting, or at first Workshop on Anti-Malware Testing Research (WATeR) held the same week and at the same venue in Montreal.

However, Virus Bulletin’s testing guru John Hawes evidently was, and wrote a typically informative summary for the Sophos blog. He paid particular attention (quite rightly) to a presentation by AMTSO president Richard Ford (a former editor of Virus Bulletin, as it happens*, and Harris Professor of Assured Information at the Florida Institute of Technology) on “Do we measure resilience?” Rightly, because the distinction between robustness and resilience in a security product isn’t considered often enough in testing. Unsurprisingly, given that testing of cleaning and disinfection is even more time-and-resource intensive than accurate detection testing.

Richard also presented at this year’s Virus Bulletin on A meta-analysis of recent malware tests (with Liam Mayron, also of FIT) and was co-author (with ESET’s Righard Zwienenberg and Avira’s Thomas Wegele) of The Real Time Threat List, also presented at Virus Bulletin 2013.

Hat tip to Andrew Hayter for drawing John Hawes’ blog to my attention, and to Ina Nestinova for reminding me that I hadn’t done anything with the information.

David Harley
Small Blue-Green World 

*Well, not entirely coincidentally. Virus Bulletin has been a major player in AV product testing for a long time, so apart from his academic stature and skills in other areas of security, his knowledge of testing at VB and elsewhere probably had a significant bearing on his being invited to take on the role of AMTSO President.