irs – Page 2 – Network Securitas

March 21, 2017

Student Aid Tool Held Key for Tax Fraudsters

This post was originally published on this siteCiting concerns over criminal activity and fraud, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has disabled an automated tool on its Web site that was used to help students and their families apply for federal financial aid. The removal of the tool has created unexpected hurdles for many families hoping to qualify for financial aid, but the action also eliminated a key source of data that fraudsters could use to conduct tax refund fraud. Last week, the IRS and the Department of Education said in a joint statement that they were temporarily shutting down the IRS’s Data Retrieval […]

March 24, 2017

Phishing 101 at the School of Hard Knocks

This post was originally published on this siteA recent, massive spike in sophisticated and successful phishing attacks is prompting many universities to speed up timetables for deploying mandatory two-factor authentication (2FA) — requiring a one-time code in addition to a password — for access to student and faculty services online. This is the story of one university that accelerated plans to require 2FA after witnessing nearly twice as many phishing victims in the first two-and-half months of this year than it saw in all of 2015. Bowling Green State University in Ohio has more than 20,000 students and faculty, and like virtually […]

May 22, 2017

Private Eye Allegedly Used Leaky Goverment Tool in Bid to Find Tax Data on Trump

This post was originally published on this siteIn March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else’s name. This week, it emerged that a Louisiana-based private investigator is being charged with using the same online tool to glean tax data on then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. A story today at Diverseeducation.com points to court filings in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, in […]

October 3, 2017

Fear Not: You, Too, Are a Cybercrime Victim!

This post was originally published on this siteMaybe you’ve been feeling left out because you weren’t among the lucky few hundred million or billion who had their personal information stolen in either the Equifax or Yahoo! breaches. Well buck up, camper: Both companies took steps to make you feel better today. Yahoo! announced that, our bad!: It wasn’t just one billion users who had their account information filched in its record-breaking 2013 data breach. It was more like three billion (read: all) users. Meanwhile, big three credit bureau Equifax added 2.5 million more victims to its roster of 143 million Americans […]