Most of the time we just install the  Anti Virus or the anti Malware programs and relax that they are working fine and one fine morning you see things not working and finally you realize that its your anti virus program which was not working at all. Here is a small test which you can do in case you are not sure if your anti virus program is working fine or not.

#1 Open Notepad and paste this string into it ( without double quotes )

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

#2 Save it and as soon as you do your antivirus real time protection should be able to detect it. In case you have disabled the real time protection run a scan for this file.

This file actually is a dummy virus which simulates like a virus which 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!”). You can read more on this at EICAR Antivirus Test File

Antivirus test String

For those of you who say your auto scan doesn’t detect it… I have tried on a few anti-virus… If your anti-virus doesn’t scan text files under real time then it will not detect it until you do a system scan. To make it detect it real-time you need to tell your real-time scan to scan all files, not just “smart” file scan. You can test it by saving as an exe or other format that is on the auto detect file list.