My Antivirus is Telling me that EICAR.COM is a Virus.

Asked By Lynn Delmerico 30 points N/A Posted on - 05/07/2012

Hello,

I wanted to run EICAR.COM to check if my antivirus is properly working, but it shows me the following error message shown in the image.

I’ve already anticipated this as EICAR is a DOS process and cannot perform on Windows 8 operating system. The weird thing is my antivirus pops up a dialog box saying it has detected a virus. Why is this so? Please help. Thanks a lot.

Error:

C:UserssophosDocumentseicar.com is not a valid Win32 application.

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• Question Category: Anti-Virus

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Answered By techdude 0 points N/A #150139

My Antivirus is Telling me that EICAR.COM is a Virus.

Hi Lynn,

There are two possible reasons why you are encountering this error message:

1. Your internet connection could have timed out which resulted to a corrupted downloaded file. If this is what caused the error message, you may want to try re-downloading the EICAR test file.

2. There are some antivirus programs that can block you even before finishing downloading or saving a malicious file on your computer that is why when you open it, it will give you an error like what you are getting.

I am assuming you are using Sophos anti-virus (based on the screenshot you have provided). Upon researching, I have found out that Sophos has created their own file to test if your antivirus is working, which also makes use of the EICAR test file.

When you run their tool, it will create a copy of the EICAR file in your C: and should then be detected as a malicious file.

To try it, you may get the file here: https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/10027

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Answered By jovanbojovic 0 points N/A #150140

My Antivirus is Telling me that EICAR.COM is a Virus.

Hi Lynn,

I know your problem and I think this is a solution. So, in these days many popular anti virus software have a potentially unwanted applications that blocks all potential viruses, Spyware and Malware. These potentially unwanted applications have Eset ( Nod32, Smart Security ), Kaspersky.

So, anti viruses with this option will probably block your EICAR test file because they think that EICAR file is potentially unwanted applications and they block it automatically.

I hope it helps.

Best regards

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• Posted on - 07/23/2012
• Question Category: Anti-Virus