Hackers may be after your tax return.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) discovered a breach on its Electronic Filing PIN application earlier this week and quickly shut down it.
The cyber-thieves used personal data it had filched from outside the IRS’ systems in an attempt to create E-file PINs — which are used to electronically file a tax return — for stolen social security numbers.
The IRS says no personal taxpayer data was compromised in the attack.
“The IRS also is taking immediate steps to notify affected taxpayers by mail that their personal information was used in an attempt to access the IRS application,” the IRS said in a statement. “The IRS is also protecting their accounts by marking them to protect against tax-related identity theft.”
IRS cyber-security experts are currently working to determine what if any damage was done by the hackers. The IRS is working with other agencies and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and is also sharing information with its Security Summit state and industry partners.
Based on its review of its systems thus far, the IRS has identified unauthorized attempts involving roughly 464,000 unique SSNs, of which 101,000 SSNs were used to successfully access an E-file PIN.
“The incident, involving an automated bot, occurred last month, and the IRS continues to closely monitor the web application,” the agency said. “This incident is not connected or related to last week’s outage of IRS tax processing systems.”
This is not the first time the IRS has been targeted. Last year, hackers stole the tax records of roughly 300,000 people.
