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. A COVID-19 Christmas, with [...]

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 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 [...]

That sort of money buys cyber criminals a lot of resources.  It’s no surprise then that cybercrime has its own support industries. You don’t need to access the "Darknet" to purchase hacker tools.  Many are commercially available (you can even buy them on Amazon!) and  have a thin veneer of respectability.  For example, they advertise [...]

In August we all heard about Team NZ falling prey to a $2.8 million invoice payment fraud.  It was the now-familiar story of a fake or hacked email, asking for payment to go to a different bank account. We should all be familiar with these tales by now. I’m sure that by now every business has in place a process for checking the validity of such a [...]

Even hackers can be hacked!  Isn't that serendipitous? There is a website, Cit0Day.in, which hosts 23,000 hacked databases.  Access is available at a cost, daily or monthly subscription. Hackers mine this data for passwords and other information.  They then use this data to crack open accounts of higher value. Its ironic then, that the site itself [...]

For our working generation, desktop computers have been a mainstay of our work life. Its a very different world to the generation before us.  In fact this month marks 40 years since IBM signed two young men from a new business called 'Microsoft' to write the operating system "MS-DOS" for their new PC.  November 6th 1980 Many of us cut our teeth on [...]

According to CheckPoint, Microsoft is THE most imitated brand on the internet. We all know that criminals like to pretend to be Microsoft for their phishing attempts, and in the last quarter, misuse of the Microsoft brand for this jumped dramatically – 19% of all brand attempts are pretending to be from Microsoft. Second place is DHL at 9%. Its [...]

We recently moved our phones to Microsoft Teams. It’s an increasingly common configuration and means we have a single programme for our real-time collaboration. There’s nothing like a project that removes infrastructure and risk. We have less to maintain, but we can do so much more than we could before. It’s easier to setup conference calls and [...]