It's Tax Season, Are You Ready?

Its the first week of February and for many of us this is when tax season more or less begins. If you're like me you W2 doesn't show up until the end of January, or right around the beginning of February. That delay however, does not stop the scammers. Already my SOC is seeing evidence of Phishing scams using various plays on the tax return.

Every year I make a point of adding some advice and resources regarding ways to spot tax scam Phishing attempts. This year I'm including this link:

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/features/tax-identity-theft-awareness

I like how it not only reminds users about the fact this scam comes around this time of year, and offers some simple tips. Additionally, there is a schedule of webinars to further help educate people. One suggestion it makes is to ensure you check your credit report. While it is great that one can get that report for free once a year from:

http://www.annualcreditreport.com/

I advise paying for a service. Yes, the major credit bureaus have suffered data breaches, but they do provide, in my opinion a valuable service. Timing, specifically response time, is vital in information security. We strive to detect things in near real time, so we can respond rapidly and minimize the impact of events. In our personal lives this same principle is true, particularly with issues such as identity theft and financial fraud. The sooner you can detect that its happening, the sooner you can stop it and recover. Credit monitoring services provide that early detection that is vital.

If you opt to subscribe to a credit monitoring service here is some additional advice I offer, protect not only yourself, but your family as well. Spouse, children, Siblings,and elderly relatives you may be responsible for. Hackers have no ethics, well the bad ones at least, us CEH (certified ethical hacker) are ethical, it's in the name. They target everyone regardless of age, gender, etc. Two groups of people who are popular targets for identity theft, the very young and the very old.

People don't expect their children to become victims of identity theft and so they don't think it's necessary to enroll them in credit monitoring. This makes them great targets because hackers may have more time to abuse the identity. And the longer a hacker has access to that identity, the harder it could be to recover from it. The elderly are another demographic sometimes overlooked. For them identity theft can destroy the remainder of their lives. We all know older family members who struggle with technology. This makes them particularly favorite targets for scammers. They often have cash available, via retirement savings or pensions or social security that make them attractive to someone looking to scam a quick buck. And again, recovering can be complicated, and place significant burdens on the victim as well as family members.

Credit monitoring can provide that early warning that something is amiss and enable you to prevent a bad situation from becoming worse. Also, with the ability to lock someones credit profile, a great option for children and elderly family members who are not as likely to need to apply for credit, you can actually help prevent identity theft in the first place.

So this tax season, brush up on the latest scams making the rounds to protect you and your family from these scammers, and look into credit monitoring services.