Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Fraud & Identity Theft

IRS “Get Transcript” Incident Hit Over 700,000 Taxpayers

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported on Friday that the total number of taxpayers affected by the incident involving the agency’s Get Transcript application is much higher than previously reported.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported on Friday that the total number of taxpayers affected by the incident involving the agency’s Get Transcript application is much higher than previously reported.

The Get Transcript system was launched in January 2014 on IRS.gov to allow users to view and download their tax transcripts, or have them mailed to their address. Users can no longer view and download their transcripts since May 2015, after the IRS discovered that the service had been abused by fraudsters.

The IRS revealed in May 2015 that cybercrooks had used information obtained from other sources to access the Get Transcript accounts of roughly 114,000 taxpayers. In August, the agency reported discovering that there had been an additional 220,000 victims.

In a statement published on Friday, the IRS said it discovered that the accounts of an additional 390,000 people might have been accessed between the launch of the service and until it was shut down. This brings the total number of affected accounts to 724,000.

The agency also revealed that it detected a total of 570,000 failed attempts to abuse the Get Transcript service. The new details come as a result of a nine-month investigation conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

As security blogger Brian Krebs pointed out, fraudster could gain access to Get Transcript accounts by knowing the targeted individual’s name, date of birth, social security number and filing status, along with answers to some knowledge-based authentication (KBA) questions from credit bureau Equifax, such as previous address and loan amounts.

The name, date of birth and SSN of victims could have been obtained by the cybercrooks from various sources — this type of information is often exposed in data breaches. Furthermore, the answers to KBA questions can either be guessed or obtained from various free online services.

Get Transcript was not the only IRS service abused by fraudsters using information stolen from other sources. Earlier this month, the agency informed taxpayers that identity thieves had targeted the Electronic Filing PIN application in an effort to generate PINs for stolen SSNs. The IRS said it detected unauthorized attempts using roughly 464,000 unique SSNs, 101,000 of which were successful in generating PINs that can be used to file tax returns online.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported in January that the number of identity theft complaints received by the agency in 2015 was more than 490,000, a considerable increase compared to the 332,000 complaints in the previous year.

Related: DoJ Investigating Leak of FBI, DHS Employee Details

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Fraud & Identity Theft

Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick has died after a battle with pancreatic cancer.  At the time of his death, he was Chief Hacking Officer at...

Fraud & Identity Theft

A team of researchers has demonstrated a new attack method that affects iPhone owners who use Apple Pay and Visa payment cards. The vulnerabilities...

Cybercrime

Deepfakes, left unchecked, are set to become the cybercriminals’ next big weapon

Cybercrime

A threat actor tracked as ‘Scattered Spider’ is targeting telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies in an effort to gain access to mobile...

Application Security

Password management firm LastPass says the hackers behind an August data breach stole a massive stash of customer data, including password vault data that...

Cybercrime

While there are likely many different approaches, here are a few points that are important for enterprises to consider when evaluating bot solutions.