News / Society

Hackers steal data of 100,000 US taxpayers from IRS

Wednesday, 27 May 2015 9:51 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 27 May 2015 9:51 AM ]

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen (AFP photo)

More than 100,000 taxpayers in the United States have had their personal information stolen from a US government website, the latest data theft that has alarmed American consumers.

Tax return information for about 100,000 taxpayers was illegally accessed by cyber criminals over the past four months, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen said on Tuesday.

The IRS said information from those tax forms was used to file fraudulent returns and the agency sent nearly $50 million in refunds before it detected the scheme.

Hackers sought to gain access to personal tax information 200,000 times through the IRS "Get Transcript" online application and about half of those attempts were successful, Koskinen told a news conference.

"We're confident these are not amateurs. These are actually organized crime syndicates that not only we but everyone in the financial industry are dealing with," Koskinen said.

“Eighty percent of the identity theft we’re dealing with and refund fraud is related to organized crime here and around the world,” he added. “These are extremely sophisticated criminals with access to a tremendous amount of data.”

The IRS commissioner said he could not comment on who the cyber attackers might be, and a criminal investigation was ongoing.

Koskinen also said the attackers must have already had a significant amount of personal information about the taxpayers, including birth dates, addresses and Social Security numbers.

“This is a wake-up call that breaches have a compounding effect and the stakes are getting higher,” said Eric Chiu, a security expert who is the president of HyTrust, a cloud computing security company.

AHT/AGB

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