RSS Twitter Stumble Digg Delicious

How To Test your Anti-Virus Software?



There are tonnes of free antivirus applications available on the internet and each of them claims to detect and remove malicious viruses from your computer. Generally, most of these softwares are available for free; but despite their claims to protect your PC, usually they are worthless. Unless you buy premium antivirus applications such kaspersky, Mcafee, ESET, etc, you won’t be 100% sure whether you are being protected by the malicious viruses or not.

However, there is one simple test to verify whether your anti-virus program is upto its mark or not. In this tutorial we will teach you how to create a fake (dummy) virus and then run it on your system to see if your antivirus detects anything or not. Here is what you have to do;

1. Go to Notepad and open it,

2. Copy paste the following code onto your notepad,

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

3. Save the file on the desktop (or any other directory you like) with the file any file name you like, for instance; fakevirus.txt. The file that you have just created is actually an EICAR test file, developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research, to test the response of computer antivirus programs.

fake virus

4. Now re-open the file. If your anti-virus displays a warning sign and closes the text file, then rest assured that it is working fine. Here is what my antivirus – kaspersky – displayed when it detected this file and neutrallized it.

neutrallize all viruses kasperskyneutrallized eicar file kaspersky

Did you antivirus detected the dummy virus? In case you are interested in the details, you can read more about this here.

Reference: Wikipedia

buy themes from templatic

Filed Under: Security, Tips
Tagged:
RSS Twitter Stumble Digg Delicious


Related Posts

10 Comments and Counting...
Abraham on July 2nd, 2009 at 8:44 pm

Great post – I am using the same antivirus application, received the same warning sign.

Started following you on twitter!

Twitted by nymphoez on July 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 pm

[...] This post was Twitted by nymphoez [...]

Musab Zain on July 2nd, 2009 at 10:31 pm

Glad you liked it :)

Jaxon on July 24th, 2009 at 1:40 am

AVG free did not detect it, however it right clicking and scanning it did detect it, but it only detected it as the EICAR test file, did not delete or remove it.

Musab Zain on July 24th, 2009 at 9:46 am

Well my Antivirus – Kaspersky – automatically detected and then deleted it. You should better look for another good alternative…

klo on August 1st, 2009 at 8:20 pm

My antivirus didn’t even allow me to save it, when I pressed save it detected it and moved it to quarantine.

Musab Zain on August 1st, 2009 at 8:59 pm

Great! then your antivirus is working fine!

Kashif on August 3rd, 2009 at 11:05 pm

As soon as I saved the file my NOD32 Antivirus detected and deleted the file automatically :)

Musab Zain on August 3rd, 2009 at 11:27 pm

Great! :D

Dark Legion on May 29th, 2010 at 8:24 pm

My Antivirus didnt detect it when i save it as “fakevirus.txt”.

But it immediately detect it when i saved it as bat file.

Post a Comment