14 DAY TRIAL // You might already know this, Wells Fargo & Co. experienced some service problems that disabled ATMs and online accounts for their customers, as The Napa Valler Register informs us. This crash left people without access to their money for about 24 hours. You can read more about this matter by clicking on this here link.
So here is what may be even more concerning than the crash itself: online scammers could take advantage of the situation to phish data. Hackers are on the prowl now, just waiting for an opportunity to snatch some information, as I've seen on InforWorld's website. As security expert Joel Helgeson stated for the same site, hackers are talking a lot about this on their forums and just waiting for the right moment to spool up the company's engines and network to take advantage of this.
Now, another way for hackers to do this is by using the fact that online accounts aren't fully functional yet, as the Wells Fargo people have announced. They have said that no matter what operations their clients will do on their accounts, these will get to see their up-to-date balance online. This is a discomfort but they promised to have it fixed by tomorrow. Now, what hackers could do is send e-mails to the affected customers pretending to be bank representatives and sending them to a hoax site that would ask for their accounts and passwords. This is a great phishing method that has been successfully used many times before. People, if you read this, please be careful on what links you click and what sites you navigate on. Try to avoid your data being phished by phony sites.
The company's services will soon be fully available to their customers, as the Wells Fargo IT team has been working hard on this.