AMTSO Announces Winners of 2024 Awards

SAN FRANCISCO, October 2, 2024 (Newswire.com) - AMTSO, the cybersecurity industry’s testing standard community, has announced the winners of its 2024 awards. The “Outstanding Contribution to AMTSO 2024” award has been given to AMTSO’s former CEO, Dennis Batchelder, while Varist has been recognized with the “RTTL Contributor of the Year 2024” award. The “Outstanding Contribution” award was established to honor individuals who have made exceptional efforts in advancing the AMTSO community. The RTTL award, presented annually, recognizes the member organization that consistently shares threat intelligence data at scale and plays a key role in the operational planning of AMTSO's Real Time Threat List (RTTL). 

Outstanding Contribution to AMTSO 2024

Dennis Batchelder served as President and CEO of AMTSO from 2016 to 2024, guiding the organization through significant structural transformations as it evolved from a volunteer-driven group to a professionally-run, industry-wide community. 

Luis Corrons, Chairman of the Board at AMTSO, said: “Among Dennis' many achievements, he was instrumental in driving the development and adoption of the AMTSO Testing Protocol Standard, a framework that has become widely recognized for ensuring transparency and trust across various types of tests, and is now regularly followed by many independent test labs. He also led AMTSO through challenging legal disputes, ultimately seeing the accusations dropped and charges dismissed. His energy, insight, consistent good humor, and above all, his faith in the value of AMTSO to both the security community and the wider online world have been invaluable in shaping AMTSO into what it is today.” 

RTTL Contributor of the Year 2024

RTTL provides testers with high-quality, real-world threat intelligence, and allows non-member organizations such as CERTs to share samples with the security industry through a centralized system. The program enables antimalware vendors to share real-life threat samples, so testers of antimalware products can use them in their testing processes, making their tests more accurate and realistic. Independent testing institutions access RTTL to use the threat data in their tests. 

“With RTTL, antimalware vendors benefit from higher quality reviews of their products, testers deliver more reliable test results, and both businesses and consumers gain more trustworthy benchmarks for comparing different antimalware solutions. It’s a win-win for everyone involved,” said Alex Vukcevic, Chief Technology Officer at AMTSO. “Varist has earned this year’s RTTL award for rapidly ramping up their contributions since joining in mid-2023. They now provide a consistent, high-volume feed, making them one of the largest and most consistent contributors currently active. Their invaluable feedback on the quality of samples from other sources has also helped maintain the high standards of the RTTL program.” 

Source: AMTSO