Phishing in Season: Tax Time Malware, Phishing and Fraud

As phishers will have it, phishing attacks are quite the seasonal trend. It seems that every April, right after a slow first quarter, fraudsters awaken and get back to working on vast spam campaigns that ride the tides of tax-filing season.

This time of year brings a few flavors of spam into the mailboxes of online users, including malware attachments purporting to be tax statements, tax authority-themed phishing, and online tax filing scams. In this special highlight, we will cover the main types of online threats that star during the tax filing season, most of which are already rampant in the wild.

Tax Authority Phishing Themes

Although phishing is most often a direct attack, targeting account holders by presenting them with messages from and replicas of their banking service providers, indirect phishing can be just as efficient, if not more.

In these scams, phishers will create an email purporting to come from the local tax authority, encouraging taxpayers to browse to a (phishing) page where they will be tricked into believing they are opening an online account, updating their personal information, contesting a fraudulent statement or receiving a refund.

Phishers use the taxation entity’s credibility and authority in order to ask victims to part with their personal information, address and phone details as well as account information, access to online and phone banking, as well as complete credit card details. Those attacks can be very elaborate and eventually allow fraudsters to devise a wider array of identity theft scenarios, including loan and credit card application, fraudulent ecommerce purchases, fraudulent tax filing, and bank account takeover.

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