The Internal Revenue Service admitted that identity thieves used one of its online portals to illegally download tax returns from last year for about 100,000 U.S. households. Yep, 100,000 households.
The criminals used stolen social security numbers in combination with other identity information to get a hold of the accounts and tax returns. Despite 100,000 households being breached, the IRS says that an additional 100,000 records were attempted but not accessed.
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but shouldn’t that information have a more secure system in front of it? I mean, based on the report, the hackers had a 50% success rate with stealing peoples’ tax information…
According to the IRS, the application has been temporarily shut down to prevent more breaches and the 100,000 known households breached will receive a free credit monitoring from the IRS. At least those affected will have a window seat view for watching their identities being used elsewhere … and they’ll still get to complain and gripe to the credit bureaus to have any fraudulent activity weeded out of their reports.
-RR
