You are right Hristo that IPS really shouldn't block EICAR as that is not really its "job", but it still has a signature for it. Allow me to explain why this is this case.
The IPS blade in its present form was introduced in R70 (it was known as "SmartDefense" in R65 and earlier) and was the original "Threat Prevention" solution. It predated the four other Threat Prevention blades (and APCL) by many major code releases, so prior to the other four TP blades (AV, ABOT, TEmu, TExt) being introduced, IPS served some of their functions. So that's why there were IPS signatures for EICAR (should be the job of AV), P2P file sharing protocols (which should be handled by APCL), and Gator (which should be handled by ABOT). This functional overlap continued through version R77.30, but in version R80.10 IPS was finally integrated alongside the other TP blades in the Threat Prevention policy, and no longer had to be configured separately. This is why if you still have R77.30 gateways using IPS being managed by an R80+ SMS, there is a separate "IPS" policy layer under Threat Prevention, as IPS must still be configured separately from the rest of TP on an R77.30 or earlier gateway.
When IPS was "rolled up" alongside the other TP blades in the mainline Threat Prevention policies in R80.10+, Check Point took that opportunity to get rid of most of the overlaps between IPS and the other blades, and this arduous task was documented here:
sk103766: List of IPS Protections removed in R80.x
Not really sure why the EICAR signature specifically is still around in the IPS blade though.
Additionally, in R80.10 Check Point split out the IPS "Geo Protection" signature into "Geo Policy" which became a part of the Access Policy (Firewall blade essentially), other certain IPS signatures became part of the Inspection Settings (once again part of the Access Policy - Firewall Blade). This left the IPS ThreatCloud Protections (many thousands of them) as still part of IPS Threat Prevention along with the oddball 39 "Core" IPS Protections, which kind of have one foot in Threat Prevention and the other in Inspection Settings, which leads to some unusual procedures being required to properly configure and define exceptions for them.
Gateway Performance Optimization R81.20 Course
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