Do you work for a corporation, especially in the U.S.? You may be at risk for tax return fraud.
ADP is a payroll provider. Hackers were able to acquire tax information of employees of U.S. Bank from ADP. Now, this doesn’t mean that ADP was directly hacked into. Instead, what happened, it seems, their authentication system was flawed and ADP failed to implement a protection strategy for the personal data to keep it safe from prying eyes.
The crooks registered ADP accounts by using the stolen data of the bank employees. These accounts allowed the crooks to get additional W-2 information—enough to commit tax return fraud. In other words, looks like a W-2 gateway was created to file fraudulent tax returns.
If it happened to U.S. Bank and ADP, it can happen many places else.
ADP says that the breach did not originate from their computer network, but where exactly it did come from is not clear at this point, as there are multiple possibilities including the hacking into of a third party service.
The hackers also used a unique company issued URL. This URL is needed to register an ADP account. It is not known at this point in time if the U.S. Bank URL required credentials to gain access to or not, but since this data breach, U.S. Bank has withdrawn plans to further post the URL online. U.S. Bank has also removed their publicly accessible W-2 form from cyberspace.
Despite the data breach, there were only minimal effects to employees and customers of ADP and U.S. Bank. But the minimal adverse outcome is no reason to let your guard down. Next time, the institutions may not be so lucky.
Solution: Fill out the IRS Identity Theft Affidavit ASAP. Here: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f14039.pdf
Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert to BestIDTheftCompanys.com discussing identity theft prevention.
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