Dozens of people were arrested today as the FBI busted up a major identity theft "phishing" scam ring. Suspects all the way from Southern California to Egypt were arrested by the FBI and represents a major blow to an identity theft "phishing" scam ring that is believed to have victimized thousands of people to the tune of millions of dollars.

If you have a Microsoft Hotmail email account you should change your password immediately. In fact, whatever service you use for email -- Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL -- change your password. There is a hacking attack finding its way to many email services that might cause your password to be compromised.

It's the latest Facebook phishing scam, relying on the fact that Facebook is popular and many Internet users are correspondingly gullible. Via a message that asks users to "check areps.at," scammers are attempting to once again steal username / password information.

The more popular something is, the more people want to use it as a way to scam people. An example would be the recent swine flu related spam attacks, and these are phishing scams that sends Facebook users to fake login sites (today fbstarter.com, yesterday fbaction.net).

As the worldwide financial crisis deepens, typical of any such event, there are those who are going to try to take advantage of it. You'll recall phishing upticks that occurred after events such as Katrina or the Asian tsunami in 2004, for example.