Wells Fargo may have a new problem following its widespread computer crash earlier this week: online scammers. There has been a growing amount of chatter in the underground criminal community about ways to take advantage of the outage, according to Joel Helgeson, an independent computer security consultant based in St. Paul, MN. Many Wells Fargo banking operations including online and ATM services were knocked offline Sunday in an outage that continued to affect users Tuesday, August 21. The anticipated spike in Wells Fargo phishing had not occurred as of Tuesday afternoon. The Anti−Phishing Working Group had counted 43 live Wells Fargo phishing sites, said Dave Jevans, the group's chairman. That's a tiny fraction of the 36,000 sites tracked by the group. "I would call that a usual background noise level," he said of the Wells Fargo activity. However, online criminals are quick to tailor their scams to any newsworthy event, and Jevens expects the Wells Fargo scams to pop up soon. According to Helgeson, criminals are planning to send out e−mails that acknowledge the computer problems and ask victims to log on to phony Wells Fargo sites in order to validate their user information.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...2;crash_1.html

__________________