News - Kinetics

Compare two (near) identical Word files, without going insane

17 Aug 2019 Comments off

Of course, in a modern cloud world, this shouldn’t happen! We should share a link to a file and use versions to maintain it’s history. But we’re not in a perfect work, and we often get multiple people updating copies of the same file. Its all good until we have to figure out what’s changed. Did you know that Word can do this for you? Either [...]

Scamming your payroll

17 Aug 2019 Comments off

Keep an eye on your payroll! We're hearing about a but bound to come to our shores soon. It's probably more likely to be effective in larger businesses or ones with an outsourced payroll. Essentially, the scammers try to intercept staff's wage payments and redirect it to their accounts. They do this through two avenues. They pretend to be the [...]

Would you click on either of these?

17 Aug 2019 Comments off

You are most vulnerable when you are busy, frantically jumping from call to call, meeting to meeting, distraction to distraction. So when you get a dodgy email, it's very easy to open it. Thankfully (or rather - thank Microsoft ATP) , the message 'unsafe attachments blocked' was a good warning. Then of course, a closer inspection tells the [...]

Is your phone one of the 25M infected Android phones?

14 Aug 2019 Comments off

Agent Smith is the name of the somewhat dry villain character in the Matrix movie trilogy from the late 90's. He appears everywhere, instantly, taking over legitimate personas and replacing them with himself. So it is a well-named virus (actually Malware) that's infecting Android phones by the millions. It spreads when a user downloads an app that's [...]

Why old versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL are putting you at risk

05 Aug 2019 Comments off

Modernise your infrastructure and future-proof your technology Prepare for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 end of support With the end of support for Windows Server 2008 fast approaching, and SQL Server 2008 recently expired, now is the time to start thinking about modernising your infrastructure. Extended Support for Windows Server [...]

Why you should care about BlueKeep

11 Jul 2019 Comments off

Regular readers will know that we are fanatical about updates and patches for all critical software. The world is more connected, the cyber-crime community is more organised and more determined than ever. If you think cyber-criminals are teenage kids working from home, think again! We're seeing more and more hack attempts every day and BlueKeep is [...]

9 Common Excel Mistakes

30 Jun 2019 Comments off

We were reminded of the risks of messing up spreadsheets in a recent : The scary fact they quote is that are wrong! The consequences of relying on bad information as a result can be insane! That reminded me of a couple of lessons from years ago in terms of good spreadsheet design. 1. Check calculations It’s so easy, especially when [...]

Feeling less Vulnerable

10 Jun 2019 Comments off

When the in early May, most of us had an uncomfortable hour with limited access to our files and systems. It seems that some red-faced engineer at Microsoft made a simple small mistake that impacted systems all around the world and it took about hour for them to track it down. A few weeks previously, many of our clients were adversely impacted by [...]

RIP Windows 7, SQL 2008 and friends

05 Jun 2019 Comments off

The end of the (support) road is approaching rapidly. They are over ten years old which is ancient in IT terms. If you think about tech around your home or in your daily life, then its quite understandable that these products after having served us well are coming to an end. We all want our software suppliers to keep innovating and developing new [...]

The alarming business models of cyber-criminals

05 Jun 2019 Comments off

It's organised, and the purveyors are shameless in their determination to steal from all of us. Heaven only knows where they get their names from. One group we recently became aware of is called 'PINCHY SPIDER', and they are doing something called 'Big Game Hunting'. Back in toolkit called GandCrab. While most ransomware today spreads [...]