Hello, welcome to the Monday, February 7, 2020 edition of the Sands and the Storm Center's

Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, and I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

Here are the U.S., and I assume in other countries as well at the beginning of the year, it's usually

tax season, and tax season. And

tax season is often also an opportunity for fishing attacks to basically play on the urgency

and some of the unfamiliarity that people have with all the details of how taxes are being paid and how all of this works.

So Intuit is reporting that they are seeing a number of fishing attempts trying to play on tax

time.

The latest one claims that your Intuit account is about to be closed and of course you have to go to the

fishing site and enter a bunch of personal information in order to prevent that from happening.

I'll add in the show notes a link to Intuit's security page and what I really like here

actually about what they're doing, they're publishing

all the different phishing emails that they see impersonating the Intuit brand.

Haven't really seen any other financial companies or so do it quite like that. I think these

make great sort of awareness exercises, these phishing emails, and definitely

something to sort of log out for.

Now, of course, with filing taxes, one of the problems that, at least in the U.S., the Internal

Revenue Service, the IRS is struggling with, is how to authenticate users.

In the last couple of years, they may have sent you like a pin in the mail in order to

authenticate you that you then had to enter whenever you filed your taxes.

The big problem here is that this is something you're doing once a year.

So passwords are easily, of course, getting lost.

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