With all necessary attention on cyber-security and fraud, we've had a couple of people asking us about insurance solutions.  This makes sense, insurance is all about mitigating risk.  Of course, insurance doesn't give you a license to be careless - you still need to take all reasonable steps to protect yourself. It seems obvious that what used to be [...]

  One of our clients recently found themselves dealing with one of the most brazen hack attempts I've heard to date. They'd heard from one of their customers that they (the customer) had taken a phone call purporting to be from our client, to say they'd changed bank accounts.  They asked the end customer to please pay invoices to the new bank [...]

Here's three quick time-saving tips - how many did you already know? Introducing CTRL-ALT-S.   This little delight will put a horizontal splitter bar across the screen.  It works in Outlook and Word.  In Outlook, its great for reading and writing long emails. You can move the splitter up or down with the mouse - and make it disappear either by [...]

Is MY Windows 10 still the latest and most stable question?  It's not a question we can easily answer. Windows 10 has two different update cycles - security/reliability updates (aka patches) and feature updates. Security updates are incredibly important.  They are the bedrock of system security.  While everything else from firewalls to antivirus to [...]

Late last year, the Australian Government introduced the Assistance and Access Act.  This new legislation makes it mandatory for any organisation whose website or data is hosted in Australia to give Australian authorities access to their IT system if requested. Given that a huge amount of data, including ours, is hosted in Australian datacentres [...]

Wow, some of the phishing hacks are getting smart! While we haven't seen this particular one ourselves yet, it's certainly good enough to fool most people!  (so beware!) The clue is that it's emailed to you - a message like this wouldn't come as an email, and certainly not from an IBM address - but wow, it's really convincing!  (Thanks for [...]

There is NEVER enough time in the day. Deadlines loom, interruptions are constant and your to-do list seems to grow, not shrink. Such are the joys of most workplaces in 2018/2019.  So here are three simple (free) things you can do to win back 15 minutes each day.  (actually mileage may vary – I actually think its closer to an hour a [...]

I've got as much (or as little) idea about 2019 as most readers. Inevitably there will be wins and losses, hits and misses, opportunities as well as headaches. But one thing is for sure - there will be changes! Kinetics is changing - we're finding more and more of our business is moving into people, and business advice.  Having IT work is one thing, [...]

In November alone we’ve seen :- A small manufacturing business in Onehunga was infected by ransomware (unfortunately just as we were moving them onto our KARE system – if only that had started a few weeks earlier, we could have prevented it!) – cost $5,000 US in Bitcoins. A reasonable sized kiwi construction firm had their invoices [...]