…Simon Edwards, that is. Simon has had considerable influence on the testing scene in recent years both as a tester with Dennis Technology Labs, where he was Technical Director, and as one of the leading lights of AMTSO, where he was formerly chairman of the Board of Directors.
The web site for his new venture, SE Labs, is now up and running (though it has a couple of rough edges at the time of writing), and already includes a report on Home Anti-Malware Protection that compares a number of products. Registration (which is painless and not over-intrusive) is required to access enterprise and business reports.
As you’d expect from Simon, the site is more informative than most sites about methodologies. There’s also a blog page which I will follow with interest. 🙂
Hark! What is that rumbling? I think it might be the trembling of some of those ‘next-gen’ and APT-detection vendors who claim that their technology is too magical advanced to be tested. The site’s About page claims:
Constantly innovating, SE Labs has developed next-generation testing to prove the abilities of ‘next-generation’ security products using a comprehensive, full-stack approach to security assessment powered by true and detailed threat intelligence.
And given Simon’s exhaustive work in that area, I fully expect that he’ll make good on that promise.
Interestingly, the recent cat-meets-pigeons announcement by VirusTotal about Maintaining a healthy community by discarding subscribers who take data from VT but don’t share data or include their service in VT’s API includes this observation:
Additionally, new scanners joining the community will need to prove a certification and/or independent reviews from security testers according to best practices of Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO).
This will presumably not affect all those vendors who are insisting that they do not use signatures and that losing access to VirusTotal’s data will not affect them in the slightest. But if you need a good testing service, guys, I think there might be one that meets VT’s requirements over here. 😉
This is probably not the last you’ll hear from me on this…
David Harley
Anti-Malware Testing 
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