The existence of an anti-virus on your system in order to maintain more security only matters if your anti-virus is functioning well. There might be some situations that makes your anti-virus software disable and not functioning well which you might not be aware of. For example in some cases a bad ware or virus makes the anti-virus disarm and not secure, or some other cases might be like being cheated by a fake anti-virus. Let say an attacker plans a fake anti-virus program into your computer to makes you fool to forget about security. As it said here on this article Eicar file is a test file that shows whether your anti-virus is capable of recognizing viruses or not. It’s require to commit the most simple anti-virus applications are capable of discovering viruses.
“The EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File or EICAR test file is a computer file that was developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) and Computer Antivirus Research Organization (CARO), to test the response of computer antivirus (AV) programs. Instead of using real malware, which could do real damage, this test file allows people to test anti-virus software without having to use a real computer virus.
Anti-virus programmers set the EICAR string as a verified virus, similar to other identified signatures. A compliant virus scanner, when detecting the file, will respond in exactly the same manner as if it found a harmful virus. Not all virus scanners are compliant, and may not detect the file even when they are correctly configured.” – Via Wikipedia.
To make this file just paste “X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H” in your notepad program and save it as a text file. Once it’s done your anti-virus should find it as a virus. If it does not happen you must be worry if any of above cases happened to you and your system is disarmed against viruses.
Hope it helps you, Stay safe.
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