Christmas Hours and Seasonal Cyber-Warning

by | Dec 12, 2023 | News

Thank you!

Thanks to our wonderful clients, staff and partners for your support in this most difficult 2023 year.  Its been a real challenge for so many of us in so many ways, and a real test of resilience. 

For those businesses that have been devastated by this year, and for their people, our hearts go out to you.

Kinetics Christmas Hours

Our offices will be closed from the 22nd of December to the 8th of January, but we know your IT needs to keep operating!

That means that, as usual, we will be open for support as normal for support except for the statutory holidays. Normal contact details (0800 kinetics and email: requests@kinetics.co.nz will be working as always)

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 scan types.

1.  Shipping notifications

Fedex and UPS phishing emails have been around for years. The last couple of years  have shown increased online shopping which means faking these emails is a Christmas favourite for scammers.

2.  Charity Frauds

New Zealander’s traditonal generousity 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 and “Conceal” Zero-trust security also check to see if the link is on list of known malicious sites.  All of these are built into KARE Foundation  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”.