{"id":95348,"date":"2019-08-27T08:23:07","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T15:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/irs-impersonation-attacks-spread-malware-nationwide"},"modified":"2019-08-27T08:23:07","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T15:23:07","slug":"irs-impersonation-attacks-spread-malware-nationwide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/irs-impersonation-attacks-spread-malware-nationwide","title":{"rendered":"IRS Impersonation Attacks Spread Malware Nationwide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/irs-impersonation-attacks-spread-malware-nationwide.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is warning taxpayers about a snowballing email attack that uses messages pretending to be legitimate IRS communications. The end game for the effort is malware being installed on unsuspecting users\u2019 machines; imposters may gain control of the taxpayer\u2019s computer or secretly download software that tracks every keystroke, eventually giving them passwords to sensitive accounts, such as financial accounts.<\/p>\n<p>The gambit starts with messages to taxpayers from email addresses that spoof legitimate IRS addresses. The emails contain a link to a spoofed IRS.gov website that displays fake details about the targeted recipient\u2019s tax refund, return or account.<\/p>\n<p>The fake emails have subject lines like \u201cAutomatic Income Tax Reminder\u201d or \u201cElectronic Tax Return Reminder.\u201d They claim to contain a \u201ctemporary password\u201d or \u201cone-time password\u201d to access the files purportedly needed to submit a request for a refund or for information. However, those files are actually just malware in disguise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is warning taxpayers about a snowballing email attack that uses messages pretending to be legitimate IRS communications. The end game for the effort is malware being installed on unsuspecting users\u2019 machines; imposters may gain control of the taxpayer\u2019s computer or secretly download software that tracks every keystroke, eventually giving them [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cybercrime-malcode","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}