The IRS announced that hackers posed as students using an online tool to apply for financial aid.
As a result, up to 100,000 taxpayers' personal information may have been compromised. The IRS is notifying taxpayers affected by this security breach.
Last month the agency announced it would do away with the data retrieval tool because of suspected suspicious activity. The data retrieval tool is supposed to make it easy for students and parents to automatically upload their tax returns to the website. The IRS suspected suspicious activity within the tool several months ago, but didn't take it down until March 3.
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Senate Finance Committee he didn’t want to shut the link down until they had evidence of a real risk.
Extra security protections must be added before the tool is made available again, which won't be until next financial aid season.
