Thank you!
Thanks to our wonderful clients, staff and partners for your support through 2022
It has been another challenging 12 months as we emerge from the pandemic and find a new normal. We know many of our clients, partners, suppliers, friends and family have had to find strength to cope with challenges from border restrictions, supply chain restrictions, staff shortages and more. We value the resilience in our community and we’re proud to play our part in supporting you.
Kinetics Christmas Hours
Our offices will be closed from midday 23rd of December to the 4th of January, but we know your IT needs to keep operating!
That means that, as usual, we will be open for support as normal, except for the statutory holidays. Normal contact details (0800 kinetics and email: requests@kinetics.co.nz will be working as always)
Travelling overseas?
How to maintain access to your email etc while you are away.
Currently, the majority of companies have their Microsoft 365 login restricted to NZ and Australian IP addresses.
That’s working well to block the almost constant attempts to hack your accounts from Eastern Europe and other hot-beds of hacker activity.
But if you or one of your colleagues are planning any overseas travel beyond Australia, it will prevent you from accessing your Microsoft tools while you are away.
Please let us know if you want your access ‘unlocked‘- here’s what we need.
Using public WiFi while you are away
Whether it is in a cafe, an airport or a shopping centre, free Wi-Fi is very tempting. Who wouldn’t want faster data, without the cost. But, as with anything that is free, be very careful! Read our article here.
Christmas Cyber Warning
It will soon be the holiday season and with all that good cheer and stress, comes the seasonal scammers. Christmas brings a predicable surge in holiday related scams. Scammers know that their success rate will go up for four common scam types.
1. Shipping notifications
Fedex and UPS phishing emails have been around for years. A COVID-19 Christmas, with its associated increased online shopping means they will try to make these emails a Christmas favourite for scammers.
2. Charity Frauds
New Zealand’s COVID mood of “Be Kind” is likely to see many of us thinking about giving a little more to those in need this troubled Christmas. Fraudsters will have their hands out looking to grasp some of that goodwill.
3. Gift Card/Coupon Scams
These are more likely to come out post-Christmas. They are special deals, e.g. goods at a reduced price for a limited time, but you must pay via gift card.
4. Travel Scams
Most of the top holiday vacation spots are already booked out. Watch out for that apartment or house rental that is suddenly available. Your best protection is to use trusted providers like Airbnb.
Protecting against these needs to be on many levels
We recommend tools like Advanced Threat Protection with Office 365 to keep your organisation safer. This scans URL links as you click on them, checking to see if it’s going to carry out malicious activity. DNS scrubbing also checks to see if the link is on list of known malicious sites. Both of these are built into KARE for Security.
Awareness is always an important tool. Spelling mistakes and poor grammar can be good clues to malicious email. Remember that your personal email is unlikely to have the same levels of protection as business email.
Four clues to help spot malicious emails
- The reply to address is a public email domain. Example: @google.com
- The domain name is misspelt Example: @KINET1CS.CO.NZ
- The content is poorly written. Example: “We detected something unusual to use an application”.
- The email creates a sense of urgency. Example: “I need to urgently process your payment”.