Use JottiQ to Scan Suspect Files for Malware

It is no secret that the files you download from the internet may possibly be infected with a malware. If you try to open those infected files on your computer, then your system might also get infected. But you can choose a safe practice of scanning each downloaded file before you open them. Your installed antivirus works well for this, but you can use JottiQ for enhanced scanning with multiple anti-virus engines. JottiQ is a free tool using which you can upload any file to the free Jotti Scan site where the file is scanned with top anti-virus engines for malware.

You can download the free JottiQ tool from http://whitehat.dcmembers.com/. The download is available both in the portable application format as well as an installable program. The installable edition has the benefit of adding right-click context menu extension in Windows. The download is just 4 MB in size. During the installation, you would be asked to download Microsoft Visual C++ redistributable package if you have not installed it already.

After the installation is finished, you are ready to scan any suspicious files on your computer. Just right-click on any file you want to scan, and choose Scan with JottiQ as shown. You can select more than one file at a single time. When you run JottiQ for the first time, you will have to agree to the license agreement.

JottiQ Malware Scanner

Soon the JottiQ main interface window would open and the selected file(s) would be uploaded to the Jotti servers. After the upload, a request to scan the file would be made – this can take some time as the Jotti servers might be busy. Depending on the workload on the Jotti servers, after some time the scan results would be shown. The anti-virus engine and corresponding results would be shown in the right-side list. In the following picture, JottiQ has detected a malware and eighteen anti-virus engines are detecting it with different virus names.

JottiQ Malware Scanner

As you can see, JottiQ just displays to-the-point results – whether infected or clean. It does not show the file hash values etc. which are usually displayed on the JottiScan web site. You can open more detailed results on the JottiScan web site by pressing the F4 key on your keyboard. If you find that a file you scanned is infected with malware, then you should immediately delete it from the hard disk. To delete a detected malware, right-click on it in the JottiQ window and choose Actions → Delete object(s) as shown.

JottiQ Malware Scanner

You can click on the wrench like icon the JottiQ toolbar to open the JottiQ settings window. In the settings, you can choose how many files should be scanned simultaneously, whether to update JottiQ automatically, enable or disable the context-menu integration among other options. You can also choose a proxy server in the settings window (this is useful if Jotti Scan servers are throttling your scan requests).

JottiQ Malware Scanner

JottiQ is a well designed and very useful tool for scanning those files which your installed anti-virus solution is not detecting but you suspect them to be infected with malware. You do not have to keep suspecting, just use JottiQ and find out what other anti-virus engines say about those files. JottiQ is not a replacement for a regular anti-virus product, but it gives you the ease to scan any suspicious file quickly online.