This year the U.S. deadline for filing taxes has been extended to July. While this extended deadline is a helpful benefit to the public, cybercriminals will take advantage of this extra time to lure even more unsuspecting users into their online tax scams. Every year bad actors leverage tax season to target individuals, businesses, and even tax professionals with the goal of committing fraud, stealing personal and financial information, and misappropriating millions of dollars.
Phishing remains one of the Dirty Dozen tax scams that the IRS warns consumers about each year. According to Verizon’s 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, phishing remains the number one cause of data breaches. Stolen credentials sit at number two – which is usually the initiated using a phishing attack that directs targets to a spoofed log-in page. Despite the best efforts of most organizations, phishing continues to be the easiest path for compromise. These phishing scams include emails purporting to come from within the organization, a partner organization, to/from a customer, a government agency, etc.
Unabated, online tax scams can cost organizations great sums of money and resources. To help combat these potential scams, large and mid-size organizations should invest in a real-time threat intelligence dataset of domain and IP information. Farsight’s real-time DNS intelligence solutions allow security teams to investigate and detect patterns of malicious activity to identify and expand investigations into phishing or other DNS based attacks.
In our new eBook, Tax Scammers: Gone Phishing This Tax Season, we discuss common tax scams, outline a common phishing attempt, and demonstrate how real-time DNS intelligence can help security teams block potential attacks and outmaneuver adversaries during tax season and beyond.
For more information on how Farsight keeps organizations safer on the Internet, contact [email protected].
Emanuel Younanzadeh is the Vice President of Marketing for Farsight Security®, Inc.
