w-2

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The scammers continue to find easy ways to dupe unsuspecting businesses into sending information or money to them. It used to be that we had to address vast fraud schemes with phishing emails requesting the W-2s of employees. That is child’s play now as most companies are aware of the scheme and don’t fall victim…

In a recent Public Service Announcement dated February 21, 2018 entitled “Increase in W-2 Phishing Campaigns,” the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued another alert about an increase in phishing campaigns since the beginning of 2018.

According to the FBI, “IRS’s Online Fraud Detection & Prevention (OFDP), which monitors for suspected IRS-related phishing emails,…

Beazley has published a report outlining data breaches in the first nine months of 2017. The report notes that the highest cause of a data breach in 2017 so far are unintended disclosures, which accounted for 41 percent of all incidents. Beazley stated: “We urge organizations not to ignore this significant risk and to invest…

W-2 phishing schemes continue to be a problem for companies in every industry. Last week, American Senior Communities based in Indiana announced that one of its employees was scammed through a phishing email and thereafter sent over 17,000 employees’ W-2 forms to the fraudulent emailer.

Unfortunately, the scam was not discovered until a month after…

Although every year we lament about the significance of data breaches in the past year, 2016 was by far the worst. Data breaches were rampant, victimizing every industry and numbing consumers in the process. It was so bad that consumers began to throw up their hands and say “My personal information is out there anyway.…

Experian Data Breach Resolution sponsored a recently released Ponemon Study entitled “Managing Insider Risk through Training & Culture.” The report is quite timely in light of all of the recent successful W-2 phishing schemes.

The report is very informative and worth the read. The highlights include that 66% of the respondents “admit employees are the…

I am pretty up-to-date on data privacy and security and technology, but the 60 Minutes episode this past Sunday night floored even me. If you didn’t see it, it is worth streaming.

Basically, 60 Minutes showed Karsten Nohl, a German computer scientist, remotely attacking U.S. Congressman Ted Lieu’s cell phone and listening to his cell…

On March 1, 2016, the Internal Revenue Service alerted the business community of an e-mail phishing scheme designed to convince employees to provide company-wide W-2 tax forms containing social security numbers and other personally identifiable information [view related post].  While the scam has taken different forms, the most prevalent approach is a purported internal…