The IRS Hack Was Twice as Bad as We Thought
Source: The Atlantic.com
On Friday, for the second time in six months, the Internal Revenue Service revised its estimate of the scale of a cyberattack on its systems, announcing that a total of about 724,000 individuals may have had their personal information stolen by hackers last year. That’s more than twice as many as the agency said were affected after an investigation that concluded this August—and a whopping six times larger than the original estimate of the damage.
The agency said that it arrived at the new number after a nine-month investigation that examined network activity all the way back to January 2014, when it launched a service called “Get Transcript” that allows taxpayers to check their tax history online. That’s the service that hackers exploited to gain access to hundreds of thousands of individuals’ personal records. According to the IRS, the hackers also attempted to steal more than 570,000 more records, but were unsuccessful.
Why the repeated revisions? When thieves break in and ransack the sensitive contents of a server, it can be difficult to assess the damage and determine what was taken—data is usually copied, not deleted, and forensics teams may not know exactly what to look for, or over what period of time.
When it issued its first two estimates, the IRS wasn’t looking at a broad enough timeframe to understand the full scope of the data breach. The first estimate, released in May 2015, only revealed 114,000 instances of unauthorized access, and 111,000 failed attempts to access tax records. In August, the agency examined the entirety of the 2015 tax-filing season, and found that hackers had accessed records an additional 220,000 times, and made a further 170,000 failed attempts.
Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/the-irs-hack-was-twice-as-bad-as-we-thought/471255/
Well, I feel secure
= new reply since forum marked as read
If nothing else.
