It’s often said that the only two things in life that are sure are death and taxes. With that in mind, cybercriminals have been upping their game in scamming U.S. taxpayers these past few months.
Given the on-again, off-again nature of COVID concerns and new tax laws coming into play, fraudsters have been relying on a heightened amount of chaos and confusion to help fuel their ongoing schemes. Case in point: Earlier this month, analysts at the Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) posted a blog describing a new malicious remote access trojan (RAT) in the wild that has been spoofing the IRS to get unsuspecting taxpayers to allow them to enter their systems remotely.
This nefarious new malware does not steal user credentials off the bat, but instead coaxes individuals to download the powerful trojan into their networks.
And that is only one convincing scam among many.
Rob Rendell, vice president of payment solutions at Feedzai, a risk operation developer, pointed out that tax scams are definitely nothing new.
“Every year around this time we see an increase in scammers trying to steal business and consumer information because people are under a deadline to send valuable personal information,” he said.
One favored stand-by for cyber-scammers is the W-2 phishing scam, Rendell noted. It’s a form…
