First one's the story that Phishing scam forces NatWest services offline - vnunet.com. What I find somewhat odd about this is that they took the step of disabling some functionality on their site...
They must have had quite a few of these scams by now and I find it hard to believe that they're disabling parts of their websites every time they get hit, as that would seem a bit like a self-imposed Denial-Of-Service...
Another story about how some customers are dealing with phishing here . Basically the guy in this story is blanket deleting mails looking for personal info. seems like a sound idea to me!.
Personally I think that standard SMTP e-mail is just about dead as a Business to Consumer communication method. Between SPAM, phishing and malware there's no way consumers and home users are going to keep using this. Really companies should not have been using what has always been a really insecure mechanism to communicate with their customers.
The thing is though, it's REALLY cheap compared with most other forms of communications (notably this is what the spammers depend on as well to make money) so they've been very reluctant to stop.
My expectation is that they will have to find some way to clearly and securely provide communications with their customers to bridge the gap left by E-Mail. Not that that's an easy problem to solve...
