We are way off the rails in the "breach department" and more proof comes now from the Internal Revenue Service.
This is the year when 145 million Americans had their personally identifying information hacked during the Equifax breach and the IRS says it probably won't change tax fraud very much.
Says a report in The Hill,
"The IRS does not expect the Equifax data breach to have a major effect on the upcoming tax filing season, Commissioner John Koskinen said this week, adding that the agency believes a “significant” number of the victims already had their information stolen by cyber criminals."
This is exactly why Stanford Chief Information Security Officer Michael Duff told SecureWorld that the Social Security Number is no longer relevant as something to authenticate that you, are really you, opening that account online. As he says, the secret is out:
The IRS Commissioner told The Hill, “We actually think that it won’t make any significant or noticeable difference,” Koskinen told reporters during a briefing on the agency’s data security efforts. Our estimate is a significant percentage of those taxpayers already had their information in the hands of criminals.”
