Test Strength and Effectiveness of your Anti Virus Software Using EICAR Test File

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Check The Effectiveness of Your Anti-Virus Software using EICAR Test FileMany People have different opinions regarding the best anti virus software, Many say Symantec, the others swear by Kaspersky and the rest by Avast, But Here is a simple but very effective Test by which you can check the effectiveness of your Anti Virus Software irrespective of any particular Anti Virus Software that you might be using, If your Anti-Virus software passes this test successfully than you can be sure its a good Anti Virus Software and will do it's best to protect your PC from Viruses and .

The Test that we are going to perform on the Anti-Virus Software was infact Created by European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research to test the effectiveness of any Anti-virus and this is harmless for your computer.

First, open Notepad. Then copy and paste into it the text on the line below. (It should all be on one line.)

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Then select File, Save, select All Files for the file type, then save the file as eicar.com. The result should look exactly like the screenshot below:

Test Antivirus using Eicar Test File

You can scan the Eicar.com file saved on your PC manually  Your Anti-Virus will detect it as a Virus.

Eicar Test Results on PC

If it doesn't raise an alert, try scanning the folder where you saved eicar.com. if your Anti Virus does not recognize it as a Virus than your Anti Virus Software is not effective against Latest Viruses and Malware.

Explaination of The Eicar Test File Experiment –

The file eicar.com you have created is completely safe. It is not a virus. It is a standard test file developed by the European Institute for Computer Anti-virus Research (EICAR). All anti-virus products are programmed to detect this file as if it was a real virus. Therefore you can safely use it to test whether your anti-virus software works, without fear of infecting your computer.

If your anti-virus product should fail to prevent you from running the file, it will simply display the text “EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE” in a DOS box. No harm will have been done, but you should probably consider using a better anti-virus product, because if it had been a real virus, your computer would by now be infected!

Other ways to perform the Eicar.com test

If you don't want to try creating the virus test file by hand, here are some easier ways to get it. They will also provide a useful test of how effective your anti-virus software is at preventing you from downloading a virus.

  • Download the file eicar.txt (right-click the link and select Save Target As…) and then try renaming the text file to eicar.com
  • Try downloading a copy of eicar.com directly.
  • Try downloading the archive eicar.zip and then try unzipping it.
  • Visit the Declude Test Mail Sender to send test emails containing eicar.com to check virus detection in email.

Your anti-virus software should alert you when you try renaming the text file or unzipping the archive, and it should prevent you from completing the direct download. At the very least, it should prevent you from running the file eicar.com after it has been created or downloaded.

I hope this helped you in finding out whether your Anti Virus Software is really working and is very effective against some of the New Viruses & Malware unleashed on the Web almost daily.

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