Officials with the Internal Revenue Service are admitting that a lack of proper cybersecurity has allowed hackers to gather sensitive tax data for more than 700,000 American households.
That’s according to information quietly released by the tax collection agency on Friday. A government review of the IRS breach was first revealed to U.S. taxpayers last year. Officials initially played the event off as a much smaller problem, declaring that only about 100,000 taxpayers had been made vulnerable to identity theft via government incompetence.
By August, however, it became apparent that hackers successfully accessed 334,000 accounts.
The number now stands at 700,000 and is likely to grow.
Hackers made their way into the IRS’s database by exploiting security flaws in the agency’s online Get Transcript application, which allows taxpayers to view line-by-line tax return information and wage data for specific tax years.
Why does this matter to you?
Well, as we noted just the other day, a hacker with just a few bits of your personal information can easily take over your life. And if you’ve ever filed a tax return, you know the IRS is a personal information goldmine.
You’ll know whether your identity was among those compromised soon enough. The IRS says it will begin sending mailers to affected taxpayers today.
“The IRS is committed to protecting taxpayers on multiple fronts against tax-related identity theft, and these mailings are part of that effort,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said in a statement. “We appreciate the work of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to identify these additional taxpayers whose accounts may have been accessed. We are moving quickly to help these taxpayers.”
That’s well enough—but it still seems like too little, too late. And the situation lends credence to a complaint that many privacy advocates have had for a long time. As a whole, the federal government is doing everything it can to intimidate private communications companies into weakening their data-protection systems. Trust us, they say, we only need your help to catch bad guys. And they promise investigative access will in no way compromise user security.
Yet, time after time we see the government put sensitive information at risk.
Every once in a while, you find a comment on a news story that really nails it. The other day, reading an article on Apple’s reluctant fight against the FBI on philly.com, I came across one.
The commenter “Bob” wrote:
Apple already shared lots of info with the FBI, but those guys changed the iCloud PW and messed everything up. The feds cannot protect privacy data of their employees that handle classified information. The feds cannot protect designs of their most sensitive weapon systems. IRS, OPM, and DOD are constantly hacked. So, how will the FBI protect a back door if it is written by Apple? We already know that hundreds of law enforcement agencies want thousands of iPhones opened. NYC alone wants 250 phones opened. Will Apple work full time for law enforcement. Will the FBI share the back door with New York City police, PA state police, DEA, NSA, etc? So, what happens when a fed steals my credit card numbers from my iPhone? So, what happens when China steals the back door from the FBI? No, the FBI is out of line here. There were ways to get the data, but the FBI messed them up. Sorry guys, I know, the truth hurts.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
But I will say this: Maybe instead of hounding Apple to hack an iPhone, bureaucrats should ask the company to shore up the data systems they oversee.
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