EICAR

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

EICAR may refer also to the Ecole Internationale de Creation Audiovisuelle et de Realision, an international film school in Paris.

EICAR, the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research, was founded in 1990 as an organization aiming to further antivirus research and improving development of antivirus software. Recently, EICAR has furthered its scope to include the research of malicious software (malware) other than computer viruses.

It is perhaps most notable for the Eicar test file, an innocent, executable string, designed to test the integrity of antivirus software. Its use can be more versatile than straightforward detection – for example, a file containing the Eicar test string can be compressed, and then the antivirus software can be run to see whether it can detect the test string in the compressed file.

Currently the Eicar test file comes in two forms, a text document (.txt) and also an MS-DOS Application (.com). The executable file is compressed within a zip folder, preventing such antivirus software detecting the test file directly, however this is dependent upon the integrity of the antivirus software being used. It is possible that the zip file could be indentified as containing a virus, or quite easily go unnoticed.