IRS breach may exceed 300K victims

“The IRS will begin mailing letters in the next few days to the taxpayers whose accounts may have been accessed”, the agency said in its notice.

The IRS says the perpetrators acquired access to the information through its online Get Transcript system, which stores information about individual taxpayers, including their Social Security numbers, street addresses, and dates of birth.

The attackers also attempted – but failed – to gain access into a further 280,000 accounts through a flaw on the IRS’ Get Transcript online service, which has since been temporarily shut down. That brings the number of failed attempts to 281,000.

The IRS has since added safeguards to prevent similar schemes, but Commissioner John Koskinen has said repeatedly that it is hard for the agency to stay ahead of the criminals.

The IRS said in May that thieves were successful in getting access to 114,000 sets of taxpayer information and blocked another 111,000 times.

More than 300,000 households face “possible or potential” loss of their personal information, the IRS said.

The organisation believes some of the pilfered information may have been gathered for potentially filing fraudulent tax returns during the upcoming 2016 filing season.

Last May, when the Internal Revenue Service announced that hackers had managed to successfully breach their network security and steal the confidential data of unwitting taxpayers, the IRS said that “approximately 100,000 tax accounts” were affected. Since the scammers particularly practice spurious activities and fool the general public, the IRS advises all citizens paying taxes for being more careful as also thinking twice prior to replying to dubious letters, e-mails or phone calls.

The May IRS data breach has left even more people vulnerable to identitiy theft than was initially believed when the theft was uncovered in May.

The thieves used the IRS’s “Get Transcript” service, in which taxpayers can get tax returns and other filings from previous years. On Monday, officials did not identify a potential source of the crime.