“Hackers accessed the data of up to 100,000 people through a tool that helps students get financial aid,” writes CNN. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday that a breach had been discovered in the fall. In September, he said, his agency discovered that fraudsters could use someone’s personal data to fill out a financial aid application, and the “Data Retrieval Tool” would populate the application with tax information. That information could be used to file false tax returns. The commissioner said fewer than 8,000 of these returns were processed, and refunds were issued totaling $30 million…
In October, the IRS told the Department of Education that the system could be abused by criminals, but because up to 15 million people use the system for convenience, they kept it available. However, in February, the agency witnessed a pattern of fraudulent activity, and it shut down the automated tool in March.
Now financial aid seekers will have to manually enter their parents’ reported income from previous tax years — at least until a new version of the tool comes online next October. In the meantime, the IRS is alerting 100,000 users who started an application but didn’t finish it, warning them that their tax information may have been compromised.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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