Testing PE files

Can anyone help where I can find sample portable executable files to test my small anti virus project? Any trust worthy reference for PE files in PC would be helping very much. I am testing on windows platform.

Thanks in advance!!!

Solution 1:

There is a decent list of malware sample links from Lenny Zeltzer at https://zeltser.com/malware-sample-sources/.

Usually I would go for Malware Bazaar https://bazaar.abuse.ch/ or vx-underground https://vx-underground.org/

Of course, you should only test malware on machines you own. I would highly suggest that you run them within a virtual machine. You can grab a win10 VM from Microsoft's website: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/