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Sunday, November 11, 2007

Check your AntiVirus- if it is Working

Hello everyone

As me you must also be using an AntiVirus with a Real Time Scanning. it sit quietly in your system tray. have you ever thought to check out whether it at all works or not? As efficiently as the product's manufacturing Company promises? Well here is a little trick which you can apply to see whether your AV and its Real Time Scanning Engine working as it should be.

1. Right Click anywhere in the empty space on the Desktop and choose 'New'. From there choose 'Text File'.

2. Now you should see a new text file being created on your Desktop. Double click on that file to open it.

3. In that file copy-paste the following:

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

4. Now from the File menu choose 'Save As'.

5. In the 'Save As' dialog box, choose "All Files" in the 'Save As Type' drop down box.

6. In the "name" filed copy-paste the following name

eicar.com

and hit "Save" button.

7. Now if you get an immediate caution from your AntiVirus, then you have a good antivirus which is working perfectly. It should either ask you to move this file to quarantine or it will itself move the file to quarantine without letting you to save it. So a good AV will never let you to save this file.

8. If your AV does not raise any alarm then you can move the file to a Specific folder and scan the folder using the AV's scanning engine to see whether it get recognized now.

Conclusion: If you are successful in the Step 7, then you are having a pretty well set Av protection. If you have to proceed to Step 8, then I'm afraid that you're AV protection is pretty week and I suggest that you should immediately switch to some other Anti Virus software.

I have tested and received feedbacks that NOD32, Avast! (Free Home Edition) and Kaspersky behaved desirably as detailed in Step 7. So after going through all the above steps if you decide to switch just Avast! Free Version if not willing to pay for other two paid ones.

3 comments:

douchrti said...

BitDefender moved it to the Quarantine section.

Unknown said...

If BD moved it after allowing the file to be saved, then i do not think it is a very good result. Though BD is a trusted AV application, there is another problem associated with it and that is it is quite a system hog.

I have tested a number of AVS and I personally favor NOD32 and Kaspersky in the paid front. I would rank NOD higher than KAS as it uses far less resources.

In the free front I do not think that there is anything which can beat AVAST!Home.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this virus checker ability test. My McAfee which came free with my broadband ISP immediately quarantined and notified that it was detected and quarantined. I found your blog from giveawayoftheday.com