US Get Hacked Again



05/28/2015 3:34 PM


The American TV company CNN made the statement that hackers from Russia allegedly got into one of databanks of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the US federal tax department, having stolen personal information of Americans.



Representatives of IRS reported that cybercriminals fraudulently got access to confidential information of more than 100 thousand taxpayers in the US. According to results of the preliminary investigation, about 200 thousand attempts to get access to such data "from doubtful e-mail addresses" were recorded.

Malefactors actually pass themselves off as the law-abiding taxpayers trying to be a part of the system IRS for verification of earlier personal data.

- More than 100 thousand of the hackers attempts crowned successful passing the authenticity checks, that is, access to confidential personal information of other people was provided to them, reported IRS.

Similar activity has been observed from February to the middle of May this year. The attention to it was paid by one of technical employees of IRS, then, measures for the activity suppression were taken. Now a number of specialized divisions of several American departments is engaged in investigation of the incident.

The head of IRS John Koskinen declared that in this case, action of "organized criminal syndicates" took the scene. "We are convinced that they weren’t amateurs", - Koskinen added.

Last week, it became known that the Federal reserve bank of St. Louis of the US Federal Reserve System’s structure underwent a hacker attack, what was reported by NYT.

Hackers managed to redirect the users, working with separate Internet resources of bank, on the pages, which hackers created specially for this purpose. The actions took place in April of this year. Up to date, the persons responsible for the cyberattack remain unknown.

Apparently the malefactors were well prepared for this attack. They could receive valuable information, including e-mail addresses and passwords of staff of financial institute. These data can be used further for the new, more sophisticated attacks to other sites of a big importance.

Earlier it became known, that the part of the U.S. President Barack Obama’s electronic correspondence was intercepted by, allegedly, Russian hackers attacking the White house last year.

Hackers got access to Barack Obama’s e-mail, yet they managed to clutch only part of data. Most likely, the malefactors did not manage to hack the personal mobile phone of Obama, which is also used for correspondence.

Earlier the Minister of Defence of the USA Asheton B. Carter published a list of reciprocal actions on cyberattacks, and also noted China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the main sources of threat in a network.

The minister paid special attention to such countries as Russia and China, having called them the main sources of threats in the cyberspace. According to Carter, Russia and China realize the long-term defensive programs, which are intended technologically to catch up with the USA. "They attain success", - he emphasized.

source: suntimes.com

 


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