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.

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.

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

Reference: Wikipedia