Ever doubted your antivirus is not up to the mark, or you think or have doubt about you antivirus running or stopped. Well most of the time we may not be even aware if our Antivirus has stopped working or is not properly undated.

Eicar is The European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research (EICAR) has been founded in 1991 and is representing an independent and impartial platform for IT-Security experts in the field of science, research, development, implementation and management.  Eicar will provide you a test file which you can download online to test your Antivirus. The process goes like this you can download a test from them and then check this file.

Well if your antivirus is properly working most chances are there that you won’t be able to download the file itself. Now if you are able to download and the open the file this means problem, this is clear indication that your antivirus is not working properly or it’s disabled.

Note: the file which you are downloaded is not an infected file, and does not include any fragments of viral code. Most products react to it as if it were a virus (though they typically report it with an obvious name, such as “EICAR-AV-Test”).

It is also short and simple – in fact; it consists entirely of printable ASCII characters, so that it can easily be created with a regular text editor. Any anti-virus product that supports the EICAR test file should detect it in any file providing that the file starts with the following 68 characters, and is exactly 68 bytes long.

Video about EICAR Org.

Lear more: Eicar.org.

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