Wednesday, 18 April 2007

IRS Warns of Online Tax Filing Scams

The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has said that people should be aware that the fraudsters are posting hoax free tax-filing services that eventually will lead up to innocent people exposing their confidential information.

IRS said that there are some web sites posing as authentic to file taxes. The IRS said that the only authentic web site to carry out work of this fashion is the Free File program that is on the IRS.gov site.

Attackers posing in this way manage to wiggle out confidential information of the taxpayer. They follow the hoax by changing the bank account number that the tax refund goes to, thus cheating the taxpayer.

Security gurus also mentioned that the attackers utilise the Microsoft DNS server flaw, to redirect web browsers from legitimate sites to doubtful sites. Due the flaw, a fraudster can send a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) packet to the interface and run malicious code on the system.

The vulnerability can pose a threat to the remote management part of the DNS server. The problem being, a fraudster can influence the core functionality with this flaw.