Write programs with notepad
I have been using the EICAR test virus to test different anti-virus products.
The EICAR test virus is a simple string that you can paste into notepad and save as test.exe…then if all is working properly your AntiVirus will popup and tell you it found a virus.
This is what it looks like:
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
To be honest I hadn’t really looked carefully at this file. I have been using it for years to verify that anti-virus was working properly.
Until today - I accidentally ran the test. I had my anti-virus turned off and I executed it from the command line. I thought it was just a random string of characters…but it is a functional program! It echoed back to me “EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!”
So I researched and discovered it was a carefully crafted assembly language program. It was designed to only have assembly language op-codes that could be represented by standard ASCII characters. If you are interested…here is the assembly code:
POP AX
XOR AX,214F
PUSH AX
AND AX,4140
PUSH …
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Written by Steve Wiseman on August 14th, 2007 with no comments.
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