Anti-Malware Testing

As I no longer have a permanent role in the security industry, this site will not continue to be maintained for the present.

Back in the Dark Ages (well, between 1989 and 2006), I was much involved in an informal sort of way with testing and evaluating security products – especially anti-virus products – mostly on behalf of the organizations for which I was working: Imperial Cancer Research Fund and, later, the NHS Information Authority. When I left the National Health Service, I started to provide authoring and consultancy services to the security industry, so you might say I became a gamekeeper turned poacher.

For nearly three years I was one of the directors of the Anti-Malware Testing Organization (AMTSO), and was heavily involved with the organization going right back to its formative meeting in Bilbao. Early in 2012, I stepped down from the Board since Righard Zwienenberg had just joined ESET, the AV company I represented within the organization, and two representatives of the same company cannot be on the Board of Directors at the same time.

For much of the time that I was on the Board, I was (somewhat reluctantly) involved in much of the PR for the organization (such as it was) and set up (among other things) the AMTSO blog and twitter account. While any member of the AMTSO board (and a few other people) could have contributed to either account, in practice no-one else did. In October 2012 the AMTSO executive team made it clear that neither the blog nor the twitter account were required any longer.  Some of the articles I wrote for the AMTSO blog are now available here: some others may be reactivated at some point if I’ve nothing to do than see if any of them are still useful.)

So, in case it isn’t already obvious, NONE of the commentary now here is (or ever was) made on behalf of AMTSO: my opinions are my own. And views expressed here are not necessarily shared by ESET or any other company with whom I work as a consultant.

Over that time, some 110 blog articles were posted on the WordPress blog. While a few official announcements were made on behalf of the AMTSO Board, the rest were my own opinion pieces and (hopefully) it was clear that they were not official statements on behalf of AMTSO: they were published on that web page in the interests of promoting independent discussion. So some of my articles are reproduced here for their historical interest, such as it may be. Material that was published on behalf of the Board of Directors (such as meeting agendas) will not be re-posted here. Other posts require minor editing to make it clear that this site no longer has any official connection with AMTSO, but may become available later.

And in case you were wondering, the photograph of the DC3 has nothing whatever to do with testing. I just like the photo. (The plane appeared suddenly while I was out walking in the Surrey Hills, in the UK. Presumably there was an airshow on somewhere near by.)

David Harley