What is EICAR? Print

Eicar is a tool designed to determine if an antivirus product is installed properly. This is a small .COM file used to test the effectiveness and operability of on-access and/or on-demand scanning of an antivirus product.

It consists entirely of printable ASCII characters, so that it can easily be created with a regular text editor. Any anti-virus product which supports the Eicar test file should 'detect' it in any file which starts with the following 68 characters:

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

You can create your own Eicar.com test file by copying the text above into NOTEPAD and saving the file as EICAR.COM.