[How-To] Check the Performance of Your Antivirus?

Virus can seriously harm your computer. I myself is the live example who’s PC get affected by different kind of viruses very often. Because at that time I was not aware from the quality of antivirus. It’s a very questionable thing even for IT specialists whether the antivirus installed in our machine is working well or not.

Well here is a quick and easy way to test your antivirus. To check the performance of your antivirus here is the process called EICAR test which will work on any antivirus and was developed by European Institute of Computer Antivirus Research.

This test will ensure the thing that your PC is secure enough to compete the viruses or not. This process can be used by people, companies and antivirus programmers to test the proper functioning of the antivirus/anti-malware software without having to deal with the real computer virus/malware which can cause damage to the computer.

Here is a step-by-step procedure to test your antivirus.

• Open Notepad (shortcut key -> Windows+R ,write Notepad and hit Enter)

• Copy the following script exactly into the notepad

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

• Now on saving rename the file from New Text Document.txt to “myfile.com” (do include the quotations marks)

• Save the file (recommended on desktop)

If your antivirus is running then it’ll immediately detect that file and will delete it.

In some other case if your antivirus is disable then run it. If it detects the file it means your antivirus software is doing well. Otherwise you may have to change your antivirus.

If you are interested to scan performance of your antivirus upto compression level , You can also place the myfile.com file in a ZIP or RAR file and run a scan on it also to ensure whether your antivirus can detect the test string in the compressed archive. Any antivirus when scanning this file will respond exactly as it will do for a genuine virus/malicious code.

Recommendation:

I personally will suggest you to go for Nod32 with updated signature and username/password database. Because in my case its working perfectly.

Note: This test will cause no damage to your computer even though the antivirus will flag it as a malicious script.