Hello, welcome to the Thursday, February 1st, 2018 edition of the Sansonet Storm Center's

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

Starting this week in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service, or the IRS,

started accepting tax returns for the 2017 tax year.

With that, the race is on between bad guys, good guys, trying to get the tax return in

because, well, the way it sort of works is first one to file a return for a particular

social security number tends to win.

The IRS tries to pay out these refunds as quickly as possible and does very little checking

initially.

The checking is really more done later down the road than well they may come and try to get

their money back later.

Problem is of course they're trying to get the money back from

the honest filer, not from the one that used stolen credentials in order to file these tax returns.

And of course, the bad guys don't have to wait to get all their paperwork together and

they essentially just try to file a return that gives them the maximum refund.

During tax filing season we also see a number of fishing scams typically pop up.

Tom has a nice example of such a fishing attack that he has seen the last couple days.

Now often these fishing attacks actually don't really try to go after

your personal information they may already have that from other breaches they are more going after

like in this case google passwords and the like in order to send more spam in past years we also have

seen some more targeted attacks against accountants and

the like that are trying then to again go more after personal information. Of course, many

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