Test Your Antivirus
No, we’re not going to recommend downloading a virus to test your antivirus program – that’s a recipe for disaster. If you ever want to test your antivirus software, you can use the EICAR test file. The EICAR test file isn’t an actual virus – it’s just a text file containing a string of harmless code that prints the text “EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!” if you run it in DOS. However, antivirus programs are all trained to recognize the EICAR file as a virus and respond to it just as they would respond to an actual virus.
You can use the EICAR file to test your real-time antivirus scanner and ensure it’s going to catch new viruses, but it can also be used to test other types of antivirus protection. For example, if you’re running antivirus software on a Linux mail server and you want to test that it’s working properly, you can email the EICAR file through the mail server and ensure it’s caught and quarantined.
Note: it’s important to test and make sure all your defenses are correctly configured and working properly, but this can’t guarantee your anti-virus will catch every new virus. Since there are new viruses every day, it pays to still be vigilant about what you download.
You can download an EICAR test file from the EICAR website. However, you could also create your own EICAR test file by opening a text editor (such as Notepad), copy-pasting the following text into the file, and then saving it:
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
Your antivirus program should react as though you had just created an actual virus.
scan the file if the antivirus program detect its then your antivirus is in perfect condition
