Criminals are taking advantage of the confusion over recent bank mergers in the United States to send out fake email messages in an attempt to steal your personal information. You've probably heard of phishing scams: fraudulent email messages or fake Web sites designed to steal your identity. Scam artists "phish" in an attempt to persuade people to disclose sensitive information. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, new bank merger scams might say something like this:

“We recently purchased ABC Bank. Due to concerns for the safety and integrity of our new online banking customers, we have issued this warning message.... Please follow the link below to renew your account information.”

Or this:

“During our acquisition of XYZ Savings and Loan, we experienced a data breach. We suspect an unauthorized transaction on your account. To ensure that your account is not compromised, please click the link below to confirm your identity.”

If you click these links, you might be taken to a fake Web site designed for the purpose of identity theft. For more information about this scam, see Consumers Warned to Avoid Fake E-mails Tied to Bank Mergers. To help avoid phishing scams:

1. If you think you're received a phishing scam, do not respond to it.
2. Approach links in e-mail with caution.
3. Don't trust the sender information in an e-mail message.

For more guidance see:

• Recognize phishing scams and fraudulent e-mail
• How to handle suspicious e-mail
• What to do if you've responded to a phishing scam

Posted: Friday, November 7, 2008 6:52 p.m. by Marcelle Amelia from a home computer security newsletter published by Microsoft.

Most users describe a hard drive crash when their computer will not boot up. With hard drives you can have one of two types of hard drive failures:

1. In the first kind, the drive still runs. Your computer will start to load but then fail to complete, ending with a blue screen or just rebooting. This kind of crash usually means you have data corruption that keeps you from booting or accessing records. For example, primary tracks in the drive might contain system data that boots the system, describes file structure and data location, etc. When those start failing, you may not be able to reach other perfectly good data. This type of crash, though still bad news, rarely needs a data recovery expert but just needs the hard drive to be installed in a working computer system. However, if you pay for someone to do data recovery, it may not be guaranteed. Be really careful before committing to high cost attempts. More often, successful corrupt data recovery occurs via external booting methods. The boot sector media may have damage while other data areas do not. Changing drive designation; or installing the hard drive in different machines can work. The object is to get access to your data.
2. Another type of crash is failure of the electro-mechanical components. This recovery is not cheap, mainly because it may involve taking your drive apart, lifting out the disc media, and placing those discs in a similar drive which does work, in an attempt to recover your data. Though the process is fairly easy to describe, it must be conducted in a clean room, or environment so sterile there are no airborne micro-particles to land on your disc. This because the data bits are stored so densely, that a single dust mite can be like a huge rock in the way as the drive tries to read your files. This can be expensive and still not produce your data.

I suggest you think carefully before spending a great deal on recovery attempts, partly because sometimes a gradually failing drive will harm data as it dies. In those cases recovery simply isn't possible and you will have spent lots of money in your attempts. My recommendation would be to always do back up. If you are one who doesn't have a lot of time for this, find a system that will automatically back up for you. Extra drives are normally less then $100 and a few minutes a week can save you lots of headache in the future. For more info, go here.

Get audio’d with Heather Dew Oaksen and Jack Straw. Jack Straw Productions presents classes, media artists and community audio programs. Jack Straw’s site also has links to audio and video from their Lake Union Oral History Project, and a video about their Blind Youth Producers program. They are opening a new exhibition called Stillpoint by Seattle multi-media artist Heather Dew Oaksen. Heather’s show opens December 5, and she has a talk scheduled for January 23.