News - Kinetics

Do you know anyone trying to get a career underway in IT?

19 Nov 2019 Comments off

And we know that getting started is always the hard part. To help, we run an intern program and encouraged senior staff in mentoring new comers to IT. Kinetics know that starting a career can be expensive. So we were very excited to hear, via our membership with CompTIA, that students under 25 can get free training and certification with the [...]

Windows 10 1909 – what’s in the latest update?

13 Nov 2019 Comments off

At last – Windows 10 1909 – the long awaited second Windows 10 update for 2019. Were you waiting for it? Actually it’s unlikely! In fact the first update, from March, is only just rolling out now, so it will be some time before this version hits your PC or laptop. On the surface, its mainly minor feature updates. Behind the scenes, [...]

“Request for Information” warning

11 Nov 2019 Comments off

A recently released report on the Botnet 'MasterMana' has highlighted a simple but effective social engineering technique. MasterMana has been spreading via emails requesting information on products or services offered by the target company. The email is accompanied by a spreadsheet and the recipient is requested to fill in the products/service [...]

Eliot Sinclair Case study – FlightPlan (Best Practice Review)

18 Oct 2019 Comments off

Eliot Sinclair & Partners (ESP) provide surveying, engineering, planning, landscape architecture and urban design consulting. Headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand, Eliot Sinclair have provided consultancy services across South Pacific and Asia with their team of 100 staff across 3 offices in the South Island. Over the years Eliot [...]

Why does my laptop feel like it’s contributing to global warming?

06 Oct 2019 Comments off

Have you ever noticed how your laptop gets quite warm. Sometimes if you are actually using it on your lap, it can get a little uncomfortable. Or why your phone gets hot enough to toast bread? The reason might surprise you. Of course, we’re so used to the slim machines we enjoy today that we often forget how big laptops used to be. Miniaturisation has [...]

Those scamming so and so’s

02 Oct 2019 Comments off

In September, Kinetics held a lunchtime IT security event focused around a presentation by our CTO Bill Lunam. After taking us though an abridged history of the internet, and an update on the current status of Internet crime, Bill explained some specific’s around the types of hack taking place, the impact they can have on a business and what [...]

Microsoft Update – Backup Authenticator (Two-factor authentication tool) and Window 10 1909 ?

29 Sep 2019 Comments off

Firstly, unless you just delete our emails, or ignore what we (and every other tech professional) have been saying, you should now be using 2FA (two factor authentication) on pretty much everything, especially your Office365. The downside is that you don’t want to have to set this up when you change phones. I had the misfortune to drop mine the other [...]

Bigger than Texas?

22 Aug 2019 Comments off

Its easy to think of security as something that’s only for larger organisations. They can afford the fancy systems that lock down networks, wireless connections and endpoint PCs & mobile devices. After all, aren't they the only organisations that hackers target? We’ve debunked that myth many times, pointing out how hackers attack SMEs in mass, [...]

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 it's 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 salary/wage payments and redirect it to their accounts. They do this through two avenues. 1) They [...]