IRS Freely Gives Out Employee User Name/Password Info

An anonymous reader writes "The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that its inspectors were able to get IRS employees to improperly disclose their user names and passwords over 61% of the time. 60,000 of the IRS's 100,000 employees and contractors thus are susceptible to computer hackers, putting personal taxpayer information at risk for unauthorized disclosure, theft and fraud. 'Only eight of the 102 employees contacted either the inspector general's office or IRS security offices to validate the legitimacy of the caller ... The IRS agreed with recommendations from the inspector general that it should take steps to make employees more aware of hacker tactics such as posing as an internal employee and to remind people to report such incidents to security officials.'"

Comments

Of course

[Renraku]

With a company so large and bloated, you should easily be able to find fucktards on which you can easily apply social engineering. You should be warned once and fired if it happens again.

Re:It took this long for this to hit /.?

[insomnyuk]

Replace 'barely computer literate' with 'barely literate' and you have a more accurate assessment.

Re:The Human Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

wow.. so insightful.
Since when is restating the fucking obvious insightful?
Mods.. wake up and take your meds !

Re:It took this long for this to hit /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good god man! how on earth can you sleep at night working for America's answer to Hitlers Gestapo??

IRS isn't exactly the paradigm of intelligence

[MSTCrow5429]

One would have to be rather ignorant, incurious and highly malicious to work for the IRS in the first place, so worming out user names and passwords from bottom of the barrel angry and/or purely selfish people shouldn't be very hard.