January 03, 2004
Avoid Jitux or Hurtle to Your Doom
New Years heralds new Jitux Messenger virus
The New Year begins on a rather ominous note with a new MSN Messenger worm. Detected by Trend Micro, Jitux (Worm/Jitux.A, W32/Jitux.worm, Win32/HLLW.Retgeek, MSN-Worm.Jitux, W32/Jitux.A.worm, Win32:Jitux [Wrm]) doesn't appear to have malicious purpose. And appears to be more a proof-of-concept. This self-propagating virus includes a file download link. The executable JITUXRAMON.EXE once installed begins sending copies of itself to every one of your MSN Buddies. Once it's send a copy to everyone on your contacts list, it begins sending a second copy and will continue until detected and stopped.
The worm affects all Windows variants, including Windows 2000/XP. To remove, open the Task List and locate all instances of "WORM_JITUX.A" and terminate them. The restart windows and recheck the Task List to verify that the worm has been deleted. Windows ME/XP users will need to access the System Restore utility to remove any infected backups.
However, it seems the $250,000 cash bounty offered by Microsoft for information on developers of the Sobig and Blast virus is paying off. I haven't seen a major virus infection since before September 2003. Which is great news because the Spam flood is near uncontrollable and appears to waste about as much energy, and time, as did the frequent virus infections.
Instead with time on my hands I decided to synchronize my multiple browser bookmarks. because we don't have unified web vision each browser uses a separate bookmark file and format. Not that Linux does it well either and each Linux variant too creates its own unique bookmarks!
AM-Deadlink 2.0 Beta looks very impressive as it checks bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla. And can also identify and list duplicate URLs. The interface is very simple. And you can check URLs, group duplicates, open a URL using the default browser or use the internal preview feature instead. Of course, this is a bit clumsy and after opening the internal browser you need to click a URL to open it.
You can also backup bookmarks, each categorized by browser type, to a zip file. You can also define where these archives are to be stored. And even export bookmarks as tab- or comma-delimited files that can be imported into a database. Unfortunately, AM-Deadlink is unable combine multiple bookmarks from different browsers into a single file.
The open-source Bookmark Manager takes an entirely different approach. It use a database to store multiple bookmarks. Each browser list is imported into a specific folder. However, Bookmark Manager was unable to import any of my Opera (.ADR) files giving an invalid file format error each time!
So I searched the web and found an online service to export Opera Bookmarks files (.ADR) to HTML. Unfortunately, as I found after importing this HTML file into Bookmark Manager, the export process had deleted all folders and saved just the URLs. Which meant I now had to manually cross-check every URL then move it into the correct folder. However I was able to setup a new database, then import my IE Favorites and Mozilla Bookmarks successfully.
I finally turned to the free Bookmark Priest, recommended by Opera Support. This tiny free utility lets you export IE, Opera or Netscape bookmarks to and from these formats. And it not only opened the Opera 7.5 bookmark file, but could export it as IE Favorites that were a breeze to import into Bookmark Manager with the folder structure intact! This is a really simple to use tool. Only finding a copy may be a bit hard. I downloaded mine from here.
Where Bookmark Manager scores over AM-Deadlink, is in the wealth of information including a title, rating, detailed description and keywords to identify with each bookmark. The software can also verify all links and either delete broken links, or move them into another folder. For this instance I chose Trash. Once verification is done, you can view the statistics. You can also check for duplicate URLs.
So in the end I have a single combined bookmarks file that's identical for all the browsers I use. Now all I need to sort out is how to make sure it stays that way. I guess I'll manually add new bookmarks to a folder 'New' and then merge all the URLs once in a while to maintain continuity.
Thats it for this week. See you next time.
Click Here to Email Me
AM-Deadlink 2.0 Beta looks very impressive as it checks bookmarks from Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla. And can also identify and list duplicate URLs. The interface is very simple. And you can check URLs, group duplicates, open a URL using the default browser or use the internal preview feature instead. Of course, this is a bit clumsy and after opening the internal browser you need to click a URL to open it.
You can also backup bookmarks, each categorized by browser type, to a zip file. You can also define where these archives are to be stored. And even export bookmarks as tab- or comma-delimited files that can be imported into a database. Unfortunately, AM-Deadlink is unable combine multiple bookmarks from different browsers into a single file.
The open-source Bookmark Manager takes an entirely different approach. It use a database to store multiple bookmarks. Each browser list is imported into a specific folder. However, Bookmark Manager was unable to import any of my Opera (.ADR) files giving an invalid file format error each time!
So I searched the web and found an online service to export Opera Bookmarks files (.ADR) to HTML. Unfortunately, as I found after importing this HTML file into Bookmark Manager, the export process had deleted all folders and saved just the URLs. Which meant I now had to manually cross-check every URL then move it into the correct folder. However I was able to setup a new database, then import my IE Favorites and Mozilla Bookmarks successfully.
I finally turned to the free Bookmark Priest, recommended by Opera Support. This tiny free utility lets you export IE, Opera or Netscape bookmarks to and from these formats. And it not only opened the Opera 7.5 bookmark file, but could export it as IE Favorites that were a breeze to import into Bookmark Manager with the folder structure intact! This is a really simple to use tool. Only finding a copy may be a bit hard. I downloaded mine from here.
Where Bookmark Manager scores over AM-Deadlink, is in the wealth of information including a title, rating, detailed description and keywords to identify with each bookmark. The software can also verify all links and either delete broken links, or move them into another folder. For this instance I chose Trash. Once verification is done, you can view the statistics. You can also check for duplicate URLs.
So in the end I have a single combined bookmarks file that's identical for all the browsers I use. Now all I need to sort out is how to make sure it stays that way. I guess I'll manually add new bookmarks to a folder 'New' and then merge all the URLs once in a while to maintain continuity.
Thats it for this week. See you next time.
Click Here to Email Me
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