Get ready guys. With the mess on Wall Street you can believe that a trickle down concept is giong to bring the threat to Main Street. How so? Well, cyber criminals are apparantly taking advantage of the financial meltdown and subsequent bailout by sending SPAM and phish email that are disquised as updates from recently acquired institutions.

I am a Bank of America member and from what I have been told banks do not prefer to contact customers via email. They still utilize snail mail for important notices. Most banks rarely contact customers via email. On the occasion that they do use email they certainly won’t include a link asking customers to click on it to confirm personal banking information.

In the wake of the shotgun takeovers now taking place, banks have neglected to tell customers about what changes will be made to their online-banking setups. So it seems that cyber criminals are trying to fill that void. We need to be aware and be prepared to debug and warn our customers of such issues.

Today’s banking emails aren’t that different from older attacks such as the infamous eBay emails and even Paypal. But they’re topical. A typical headline or subject line may address a recent merger.