Thousands of US taxpayers may have had their details leaked by the IRS

Date:
Mon, 05 Sep 2022 19:40:19 +0000

Description:
Data relating to over 120,000 individuals using a specific type of tax return may have been lost by the IRS.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has revealed it inadvertently exposed the data of approximately 120,000 US taxpayers.

The agency says that all of the offending information has now been removed from its website, and it will send notifications to all those impacted within the coming weeks.

The leak impacted users of a specific type of business tax return, Form
990-T, used by tax-exempt entities such as charities and retirement accounts, to pay income tax on income that is generated from investments or unrelated
to their primary purpose. What was revealed?

The leak included names, contact information, and financial information about income within the impacted accounts, according to the agency's statement, however, it reportedly didn't contain Social Security numbers, complete individual income information, detailed financial account data, or other "sensitive information that could impact a taxpayers credit".

This isn't the first time the IRS has struggled with data protection issues.

Investigative journalism organization ProPublica published IRS data relating to some of the wealthiest individuals in the US such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and the source of the leak is as of yet unknown. READ MORE:

Unsurprisingly, most data breaches are caused by hacking

Marriott suffers yet another data breach

Our guide to the best endpoint protection

However, the agency's IT systems and tax software could soon be in for a huge improvement.

In August 2022, US President Joe Biden signed off an additional $80 billion
of funding for the IRS, part of which was earmarked to help overhaul its IT systems and to hire experienced new technology specialists.

But it's not just the IRS that has leaked data in recent months, it seems all types of organizations, big and small are vulnerable to data leaks.

The data of over 2.5 million individuals who have taken out student loans
with either the Oklahoma Student Loan Authority (OSLA) orEdFinancial has been exposed in a data breach as a result of a third-party IT provider becoming compromised. Scared about having your data on the black market? Checkout our guide to best ID theft protection



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/thousands-of-us-taxpayers-may-have-had-their-de tails-leaked-by-the-irs/


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)