Welcome to Smuggle Me

I don’t know how many people have an antivirus scanner on their computer that is doing absolutely nothing. I’m sure it’s a lot. Too many times virus scanners aren’t scanning everything, they aren’t updated or something is going wrong.

lifehacker’s created a way for you to test your virus scanner. You can put a simple text file on your computer that is completely harmless, but should be caught by your scanner. If it’s not then you have some work to do.

Here’s a description from their website:

The EICAR virus test is a harmless text file that is detected as a virus by most AV vendors. You can use it to verify that your local virus scanner is working (just copy the string into a plain text file), check to see if your email server scans for viruses (email yourself a copy), and test if scanners detect viruses inside archives (put it inside a zip file).

This is great for those HIPAA audits.