Is it real, or is it a phishing scam? This week's headlines give unintended credibility to one of the phisher's most effective social engineering tactics - the urgent warning that a customer's account has been compromised. The phishers' fiction has become a grim reality for hundreds of thousands of customers of America's biggest banks, which are now notifying customers that their information may be at risk. But the banks aren't specifying how they are notifying customers - a critical detail for anxious account holders, who may be ripe to succumb to bogus email "security alerts" from phishing fraudsters.

By Rich Miller at Netcraft.

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