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 free 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.
Great post – I am using the same antivirus application, received the same warning sign.
Started following you on twitter!
Glad you liked it 🙂
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.
Well my Antivirus – Kaspersky – automatically detected and then deleted it. You should better look for another good alternative…
My antivirus didn’t even allow me to save it, when I pressed save it detected it and moved it to quarantine.
Great! then your antivirus is working fine!
As soon as I saved the file my NOD32 Antivirus detected and deleted the file automatically 🙂
Great! 😀
My Antivirus didnt detect it when i save it as “fakevirus.txt”.
But it immediately detect it when i saved it as bat file.
my copy of Microsoft Security Essentials (free) detected it.
Symantec AntiVirus detected and did not allow to save it
AVG knows it is fake, no False positive.
Well I’m using Windows 8.1 Pro without any antivirus other than Windows Defender. As soon as I created that file and saved it, Windows Defender popped up stating that there has been a threat detected and it is working to remove it.
It did not allow me to open it and requested a PC reboot. As soon as the pc restarted, BAMM!! the file was gone.
As you stated that if an Antivirus detects this particular file then be rest assured that everything is working fine. I think Defender is doing a pretty good job here.