When in our VB100 test lab we set up an anti-virus product, one of the first things we do is to see if it works by making it scan the EICAR test file. This 68-byte file is supposed to be detected by any anti-virus product but does not perform any malicious activities and thus can safely be copied to any computer.
As Randy Abrams (then at
Microsoft
, now Senior Security Analyst at
Webroot
) explained in a paper presented at the VB99 conference, such a file was particularly important at a time when the majority of malware encountered consisted of self-replicating viruses. This is less the case today, but there are still many cases in which one needs a reliably detected but otherwise harmless file, and the EICAR test file thus remains in wide use.
Not all of this use is totally harmless though: the fact that a specific 68-byte string can trigger an anti-virus alert has been used in proof-of-concept denial-of-service attacks, for example by adding the string to a blockchain.
Today, for Throwback Thursday, we republish Randy’s 1999 paper in both
HTML
and
PDF
format.
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