How to Test the Working of your Antivirus

Most of us always think about the best antivirus for our pc. But sometimes the antivirus might not be working well or correctly. Sometimes you wan to check the working of your antivirus but the question is how to check whether the antivirus is working correctly or not.

I am going to tell you about a small test which can be used by users to test the working of your antivirus software. The test is called as EICAR test which can be used to test any antivirus and was
developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR). So now you don’t need a computer virus to test the working of your antivirus you can simple do so by following the steps given below.

1. First of all open a notepad and copy the following code into the notepad and save it as "anything.txt"
for example: file.txt, virus.txt, etc..

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

"Important thing to note here is that most of the antivirus will display a warning message in step-1 itself when scan the file. and will remove the file. If step-1 is working then you will not need to apply remaining steps"

2. Rename the file from "anything.txt" to "myfile.com"

3. Now run the antivirus scan on this file.

If the antivirus is working correctly then it should give a warning or alert and delete the file immediately. If no such warning or alert message is displayed then you either need to re-install your antivirus or change the antivirus.