Tax Day 2019 is here. Its that time of the year in the US when tax filing preparations are in full swing, everyone is busying calculating their taxes and hustling to fill them. A majority of tax filing takes place online, i.e., electronically — and with that comes serious menace of cybercrime. Tax Filers, login credentials, and credit card information are at jeopardy.
IRS expects that Nine out of Ten tax returns are prepared electronically. This poses a grave threat to highly sensitive user information being stolen before Tax Day 2019.
Cybercriminals are having a field day considering the fact that a huge chunk of potential victims will file taxes online.
Cybercriminals are felicitous to abuse the convenience of e-filing system of taxes on Tax Day 2019 via phishing pages, domain infraction, and fake mobile applications.
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Jordan Herman a researcher from RishIQ(Digital Threat Management Company) said the following
Cybercriminals very often leverage holidays, events, and other important dates in their threat campaigns, so it makes perfect sense that a group is capitalizing on the tax deadline coming up.
Research Conducted by RiskIQ: The Outings?
To analyze the various methods through which thread actors do their job RiskIQ, ran an investigation of their Blacklist sites versus the 2B site requests made by tax filers. They ran a keyword query from their Blacklisted sites and mobile apps database looking for occurrences of terminology recited to the IRS and the company names of leading tax filing software.
The final results exhibited a grim situation, RiskIQ uncovered 1,235 cases of phishing endeavors targeting tax filers and 468 Blacklisted websites and as many as 20,000 occurrences of domain infringement.
How do I save myself from Tax Day 2019 scam?
- Use paid anti-virus software which is highly reputed you can also protect your device by securing your firewall.
- Never use public Wi-Fi for the Tax Day 2019 filing process always use data via a trusted network.
- Always download apps from trusted sources.
What are the red flags?
- The app is not available on either the Apple AppStore or Google’s Play store.
- The app asks for irrelevant permissions that have nothing to do with the intended purpose of the app.
Fake and scammy apps can literally do anything with your phone. Every data of yours is compromised, they can download malicious software and files, change your settings and much more.
One should note that the IRS never calls you or sends you a text, they generally send you a letter which is delivered by the U.S. Postal Service.
So whenever you get a call from someone stating that they are from IRS, report them to the authorities.
