Hints Tips & Rants
by Dale Atchison
Tampa Bay Computer Society


Phishing Scam

The following message arrived in one of my Inboxes (I have 8):
From: PayPal <support@paypail.com>
Subject: Account (Ref 91152541720)
Date: 12/02/2009 02:19 PM
To: Bits@ComputerRepairShop.biz

Dear Member,

We are constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.


Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):

We determined someone may have tried to access your account without your permission. For your protection, we have limited your account access.


How can I restore my account access?

The attachment contains the steps to restore your account access . Please download the attachment and complete the steps.

And there was an attached file, Auth_Form.html.  I assume I was supposed to double-click it; I further assume it contained a harmful script.  This email wasn't really from PayPal; note the extra letter "i" in the return address:  paypail.com.  I don't freakin' think so!

I could easily have been fooled by this one; I recently started using PayPal again, after a few years of letting the account sit idle, and I tried several times to log on before I finally remembered ny username and password.  But...

  1. I would never open an executable attachment, no matter who it was from; and Yes, nowadays HTML documents can be executable;

  2. The suspect email came to my Bits 'n' Bytes address, not an address I would ever have given to PayPal (I have to admit, I'm glad this didn't come to my GMail address);

  3. The spam filter at our Web Host,  1and1.com , caught the message, properly tagging it as spam.  (To be fair, I bet GMail would have caught it, too.  They catch several hundred spam messages every month.)
People, I keep telling you, and now I repeat:  watch out!  The world is literally crawling with low-life types who will steal your money, your identity, even your email account.  If you get an email that seems even slightly wrong, delete it; if it was important, they'll send it again.  If the email looks all right, but has an attachment you weren't expecting, save the attachment to your desktop, then right-click it and scan for malware before opening the file.  And it wouldn't hurt to call the person who sent the file, to see if it really came from them; spyware and viruses routinely harvest email addresses from computers they infect, then send out mass emails without the computer owner's knowledge.


Tips.Net

We have a new contributor joining us this month.  Sharon Parq Associates owns the popular Tips.Net website, and they've generously offered to share two free tips a month on this page, usually one Word and one Excel tip.  Their tips seem to be for intermediate Windows users, the level I perceive the majority of our readers to be.  Thousands of additional tips are available at  Tips.Net .


Microsoft Excel Tip:  Determining High and Low Non-Zero Values

There may be times when you need to derive the smallest (or largest) value from a range, unless the smallest (or largest) value is zero. For instance, you might have a range of values such as {0, 3, 1, 4, 2}. In this case, the lowest value is zero, but the value you really want returned is 1.

There is no intrinsic function within Excel to return a value as stipulated here. However, you can create a formula that will do the trick. Assuming that the range of values you want to analyze are in C4:C8, the following formula will return the lowest non-zero value:

=IF(MIN(C4:C8)=0,SMALL(C4:C8,COUNTIF(C4:C8,"=0")+1),MIN(C4:C8))

This formula uses the MIN function to determine if the lowest value in the range is zero. If it is, then the SMALL function is used to derive the lowest value, excluding the zeros. (The COUNTIF function returns the number of zeros in the range, and therefore tells SMALL which item from the range to pick.)

A small change to the formula allows it to be used to return the largest non-zero number in a range:

=IF(MAX(C4:C8)=0,LARGE(C4:C8,COUNTIF(C4:C8,"=0")+1),MAX(C4:C8))

These formulas will work for any range, unless the range is made up entirely of zeros. In that instance, a #NUM! error is returned.

Copyright © 2009 by Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.  Reprinted by permission.
Thousands of free Microsoft Excel tips can be found online at  excel.tips.net


Microsoft Word Tip:  Splitting a Table

Word provides a powerful table editor that allows you to create and modify data in tabular format. If you are working with large tables, there may be times when you need to split a table in half. To do this, follow these steps if you are using Word 2007:

  1. Position the insertion point anywhere in the row you want as the first row in the table that is split-off the larger table.
  2. Display the Layout tab of the ribbon. (This tab is only visible if your insertion point is within a table.)
  3. Click the Split Table tool, within the Merge group.
If you are using an older version of Word you can split a table by following these steps:
  1. Position the insertion point anywhere in the row you want as the first row in the table that is split-off the larger table.
  2. Choose Split Table from the Table menu.
The result is that Word inserts a Normal-formatted paragraph prior to the table row in which your insertion point was placed. The two resulting tables can now be treated independently.

Copyright © 2009 by Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.  Reprinted by permission.
Thousands of free Microsoft Word tips can be found online at  word.tips.net .


Avast! Did a Boo-Boo!

Yeah I know, I've been pushing Avast! like they were the only anti-virus package out there.  And as far as I'm concerned, they are.  But even the best can screw up once in a while; heck, I made a mistake myself, 'way back in '97.  But enough about my love life, let's stick to computer stuff.

The initial release of Avast!'s Dec 3rd virus definition file contained an error, causing it to identify nearly ALL programs that check files on the Internet as being infected with the Delf-MZG Trojan.  As I've said so many times, I trust Avast! implicitly, so when it said I should run a boot-time scan, I did.  It found 165 'infected' files, and when the Virus Chest was full, I let Avast! delete the rest of the files it found.

I was disappointed that so many programs seemed to be damaged, especially since so many of the 'infected' files had come from GiveAwayoftheDay.com, and can't be reinstalled.  (I've been meaning to do another full backup, but there just never seems to be enough time!)  I was even more disappointed after I did a Google check and found out thousands of people were posting comments saying the 'Delf' detections were 'false positives':  harmless files that shouldn't have been moved or deleted.

I filed a 'false positive' report with Avast!, really too late to matter; they had released a new Dec 3rd virus definition file by 1:00AM.  So, only night owls like me were likely to get bitten by this mistake; you had to have your computer on and opening files between midnite and 1:00 to get caught.

Once I realized the files weren't really infected, I opened the Avast! program, went to  Tools  »  Virus Chest, highlighted all the files, and clicked on  File  »  Restore to put them all back where they came from.

What I SHOULD have done:  When files that had gotten past Avast!'s Resident Shield as they were initially installed suddenly checked out as infected when I tried to open them, it would have made a lot of sense to check for an even newer update before running a boot-time scan.  The folks at Avast! are very sharp; in the extraordinarily rare event they make a mistake like this, it only takes a few minutes and one or two thousand 'false positive' reports for them to realize and rectify the error.

Bottom line:  Be Skeptical, take practically nothing on faith, even from trusted sources.  Excepting myself, of course.


Till next month...

DaLe aTchiSon



I send these guys a few dollars every month... sure wish you would join me.
And 100% of your labor charges go to this rescue, too.