In January 2008 representatives of Avira and more than 40 other security software technologists, testers, academics and reviewers came together to found the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO) in Bilbao, Spain.

The motivation for the foundation of AMTSO was helping improve the quality and relevance of anti-malware testing. Since then, the members of AMTSO have had several meetings and a lot of things to discuss. The latest meeting took place in Oxford, UK on October 30/31 2008.

Picture from the AMTSO meeting in Oxford end of October.

Members agreed on guidelines and set recognized standards for testing security software for the first time. Therefore there are now two documents available for the general public, “Fundamental Principles of Testing”, which reflects the basic principles for testing anti-malware products and “Best Practice for Dynamic Testing”, which defines a standard for the dynamic testing of anti-malware products, a testing methodology that becomes more important every day.

The complete documents can be found at the homepage of AMTSO, http://www.amtso.org/.

Philipp Wolf
Viruslab

The test laboratory av-comparatives.org has published the results of their August roundup of antivirus solutions. Avira clearly leads in the field of malware detection. The testers thus rated Avira AntiVir with Advanced+, their highest certification level. The combined score for detection of 2.3 million malware samples was 99.6 percent, which is a clear first place, as well as the 99.2 percent in the Test Set B, which consists of more than 1 million malware samples from the past 9 months. The few false positives are subject to our ongoing development and will be ironed out soon, too.

This test proves once more that Avira products deliver the best available protection on the market. And that at a scanning speed that av-comparatives rates with “fast”! We are very proud to be rated Advanced+!

Dirk Knop
Technical Editor