Thoughts on the IRS Data Breach
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced Tuesday that a brute force hacking attempt has compromised approximately 104,000 taxpayer accounts through the utilization of the “Get Transcript” tool located on IRS.gov. Hackers utilized information gleaned from black market sources to answer identity verification questions and receive confidential information from the IRS system. The IRS reports that the system has been used 23 million times to provide taxpayers important information about their tax accounts as well as wage and earnings information. “It is important to understand less than one half of one percent of successful requests were fraudulent,” said Aaron Blau, a [...]