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Feb 28

Test to See if Your Antivirus Software Works (Safe)

Windows Vista Guides, Windows XP Guides Add comments

anti-virus

Most of you probably have anti-virus software on your computer. If you do, good job; however, are you sure it works? Let’s do a quick test.


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

  1. Open Notepad and paste the above line into it.

    2. anti-virus

  2. Save the file and real time protection should immediately find the file. (If you have real time protection turned off, you will need to scan the file.)

    3. anti-virus

  3. If this doesn’t work for you, make sure your virus checker is up to date and working.

This file is a dummy virus, which simulates a virus. This string is provided by EICAR for distribution as the “EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File”, The file is a legitimate DOS program, and produces sensible results when run (it prints the message “EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!”).

What Next?

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15 Responses to “Test to See if Your Antivirus Software Works (Safe)”

  1. Tim R Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Nice, mine’s working!

  2. __o00o___C00D___o00o Says:
    February 28th, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    Niiiiiiiice!!! I could scare some people wit this

  3. Dan Says:
    March 6th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Nice post man. I love this site. Good job!

  4. J.C. Says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 1:05 am

    Maybe I missed it but you forgot to mention to save as .exe
    or at least mine didn’t detect it until I did and that isn’t something I expect most folks to know.

    Love the site - great work!

  5. Rich Says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 1:14 am

    Thanks for the tip J.C. Try saving it as a txt/doc/rtf … or anything for that matter, and it will still catch it — which is good news for us!

  6. Angad Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    Yup, It Works with my Norton Antivirus 2008 too!

  7. [AnubiS] Says:
    April 5th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    Works perfectly with Avast 4.8. thanks for the tip.

  8. Michael D Says:
    April 6th, 2008 at 10:34 am

    Tested on AVG and it works!

  9. Bernadette Larson Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 8:52 am

    It works with AVG8.0

  10. - Says:
    September 24th, 2008 at 11:13 am

    Good Layout and Design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. . :) :) :)

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