KINETICS NEWS

Adobe Flash is no longer. For so long, Flash has been a mainstream of internet web pages, giving us animated graphic experiences in place of what used to be mundane screens. It's about 25 years old, and back then, was quite a revelation. Initially you might recall the name ‘Macromedia Flash’, until Adobe paid US$3.4B for it in 2005. That [...]

We keep making the point that nothing can guarantee you won’t be hacked. But you can, and must, mitigate your cyber-risk. We think tools like Multi-Factor Authentication is crucial for protecting your IT systems – and MFA should be on EVERYTHING you use – your email and documents (Office 365), your financials (e.g. Xero), your CRM tools, your [...]

It's a new year and who knows what it will bring? COVID vaccines or not, 2021 is bound to have surprises. One prediction we can make with absolute confidence is that we need to be more careful than ever about protecting our data from ever-increasing computer security threats.  As we keep saying, you can't eliminate the risk, but you can reduce [...]

In the last week, we’ve seen two major successful attacks on critical US IT management and Cyber security tools. The first we learned about was on FireEye, which is one of the leading and most trusted cyber security tools, used by much of the Fortune 500.  The second one that we read about was Solarwinds ‘Orion’ - a well-known and commonly [...]

2020 saw a crazy amount of ransomware attacks.  We've warned repeatedly of the increasing sophistication and organisation of these bad actors.  Names like RangarLocker and  are cyber-businesses or do it yourself cyber-crime kitsets designed to cause havoc for you and profit for the perpetrators. Snipers, not shotguns - Expect more targeted [...]

COVID : Lockdowns, work from home, toilet paper shortages, return to level 3, hand cleaners, level 2, mask envy, normality (kind of), lockdown again, election(s), housing market and more.  Perhaps the only thing we can be sure of is that the surprises are not over yet. With all this going on, it is easy to have missed a milestone from the start of [...]

In September the NZ Stock Exchange was the victim of an attempted extortion via a DDOS attack.  The attack took them offline serval times over a number of days.  Many business are now asking, what is DDOS and could we fall victim to it? DDoS are surprisingly easy to undertake.  The type of software used, called a Command and Control system, is [...]

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 scan types. Fedex and UPS phishing emails have been around for years. A COVID-19 Christmas, with its associated [...]

While there are few things as annoying as Office occasionally pausing to install new features, there is a benefit in the new abilities you get. While the timing always seems to be terrible, it should save you time in the long run. Here’s three of the updates coming through now : Translate overseas emails! First, when you receive a message in [...]

CERT NZ have issued a warning about Nitro PDF.  It’s a common PDF tool that users log into to share documents.  Unfortunately, there are reports that hackers have breached their database We’re being told that “Nitro PDF, a PDF enterprise document creation and sharing web application, has experienced a significant data breach. A person claiming to [...]