Create your own EICAR test virus automatically

We have earlier covered an article about how to test your antivirus using EICAR test virus. That article covers, how to manually create the EICAR test virus. In this article, we will show you how to use the EICAR Test tool to automatically create the file for you.

You can download the EICAR Test tool on your desktop. Once you have downloaded, extract all the files from eicar_test.zip to a folder. You can use a tool like WinRAR, WinZip, 7-Zip or any other archive extractor of your choice to extract the files.

Extract files to a folder

You will find a file EicarTest.exe inside the folder where you extracted the file. You can identify this file by its funny Ratatouille icon.

The EicarTest.exe file with Ratatouille icon

Double click on EicarTest.exe to run it. You do not need any administrator level permission. If you are logged into Windows with a standard user account, then thats enough. Upon running the program you would see a window with only one button lebeled Generate.

EicarTest program with the Generate button

Click on the Generate button. The program would create a file eicar.com in the same folder as eicar_test.exe. This newly created file eicar.com is the EICAR test virus file. At this point, your anti-virus should come into action and prevent access to this test virus. The following is a snapshot of avast! 5.0 blocking the eicar test file.

avast! 5.0 detects EICAR test virus

This is how Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) detects the eicar test file —

Microsoft Security Essentials detects EICAR test virus

For more information about the EICAR test virus, you can visit this site : http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm.