Anti-Virus - EICAR Test File

EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File

The EICAR test file is recognized by the majority of anti-virus programs as a test virus.

It consists entirely of printable ASCII characters, so that it can easily be created with a regular text editor.
Any anti-virus product that supports the EICAR test file should detect it in any file providing that the file starts with the following 68 characters, and is exactly 68 bytes long.
It is very useful for testing as doing so against a real virus could be extremely dangerous.

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

NOTE:

The first 68 characters is the known string.

It may be optionally appended by any combination of whitespace characters with the total file length not exceeding 128 characters.

The only whitespace characters allowed are the space character, tab, LF, CR, CTRL-Z.

To keep things simple the file uses only upper case letters, digits and punctuation marks, and does not include spaces.

The only thing to watch out for when typing in the test file is that the third character is the capital letter “O”, not the digit zero.