Another tax season, another Internal Revenue Service security breach. This time the breach involved criminals using stolen data and malware in attempt steal E-File PINs from around 100,000 people. Luckily, IRS officials report that the breach was caught before any tax infomration was stolen. The IRS is now notifying the thousands of taxpayers who were affected by the breach.
Officials report that this incident is not connected to last week's outage of IRS tax processing systems. A security breach was not ruled out of last week's outage, although officials "believe" the outage was caused by a hardware failure.
"The IRS is continuing to examine the underlying cause of the outage yesterday as well as monitoring any follow-up issues. It's important to note that at this time this situation appears to be a hardware failure." - IRS.gov
At least one lawmaker isn't buying the "hardware failure" claim.
"My initial gut reaction is that it may be a hack. You just don't have systems collapse and people can't use the systems online," House oversight committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told the Fox Business Network. "It's not like they run out of batteries or something. It really does smell like a hack."
Perhaps the IRS needs more IT professionals if it cannot determine what caused the processing system to go down. Or maybe the old saying, "where there's smoke there's fire," holds true. This is, afterall, just the latest in a long list of security incidents at the IRS. In August of 2015, the agency announced that more than 300,000 accounts were breached in May of that year.
One thing is certain, and it's that cybersecurity is not what it should be at the IRS. Not that doing taxes is fun, but users shouldn't be paranoid about typing personal information into an official governement website.
