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If this were a company, the headline would have been "IRS hacked; tax information stolen from 100,000." Instead the IRS was able to spin it to The Washington Po
by malchow 11y ago
If this were a company, the headline would have been "IRS hacked; tax information stolen from 100,000." Instead the IRS was able to spin it to The Washington Post. The headline is "thieves stole tax info." Thieves!
The real headline is that the IRS is hackable.
- grecy 11y ago> Instead the IRS was able to spin it to The Washington Post. The headline is "thieves stole tax info." Thieves! They spun it even better than that. The headline is "thieves stole tax info from 100,000 people" (i.e. not from the IRS, but from the people themselves)
- ljk 11y agowhy does the realization of this sneaky tactic make me so mad
- ceejayoz 11y ago> The real headline is that the IRS is hackable. That's not borne out in the slightest by what we know from the article. These people might've been phishing victims - you wouldn't claim a bank is hackable because people entered their bank password on a phishing site.
- mdavidn 11y agoBut these aren't phishing victims. The IRS deployed a system which returns a treasure trove of personal information to anyone who presents a few shared secrets. This is a fundamentally flawed authentication mechanism devised by the IRS.
- ceejayoz 11y agoThose shared secrets were likely obtained by either phishing or a data breach. There's no indication thus far that the IRS was the source of the information that let people obtain these returns.