Someone asked me today about the lack of W-2 phishing reports or W-2 incidents that we’ve seen so far this year. I responded that I hadn’t really had time to research W-2 attacks yet, but a reader, “DLOW,” has now kindly submitted a news story by Mary Richards of KSL in Utah. The kinds of tax documents involved in this incident do not contain full Social Security numbers like W-2 forms do, but it’s still a tax document incident:
Forty-two thousand students at Salt Lake Community College are learning that their tax documents got lost.
An email sent to students and obtained by KSL Newsradio explained that a memory drive with tax documents for the students somehow fell out of an envelope on its way from a contracted company to the college.
SLCC spokesman Joy Tlou said that when the college processes these documents that deal with the 1098-T tax form used for getting educational tax credits, the college goes through a third-party vendor and uses a secured cloud server to access the information. That information is then also backed up on a memory drive and sent to the college.
Read more on KSL and see the FAQ on the incident.