It's that time of the year again: Texas school district blabs staff tax documents to phishers A school district in Texas says it lost sensitive tax information from every worker after a single employee was duped by a phishing attack. Dallas-Fort Worth news station NBC5 reports that the Argyle school district is warning its workers that their W-2 tax forms were lost in a phishing attack. (Workers in America have just …
This would increase news viewership thus giving the members of the SWAT team and local reporters something to do. Likewise, the various officers in charge of the constabulary would be kept busy fielding questions from the press. Lawyers would obviously have their time taken up on both sides of the issue. Social services would be needed to take care of any surviving children. Commemorative merchandise would be sold helping all involved remember the event. The public would be entertained. The economy would be stimulated.
What's not to like?
A quick look at their directory page shows that they have around 250 staff, so I'm impressed that the victim managed to send that number and bulk of tax forms (Word documents? PDF files? - many, many megabytes of email, either way) to the scammer without having to call on their IT department for help.
I just received my W-2 as a PDF. It's 45K in size.
For 250 employees that's 11 MB. Even less if it was a single PDF so all the PostScript header stuff wasn't repeated 250 times.
A bit large for an email attachment, but if the District Superintendent asks, then you do whatever it takes!
Which might work when your looking for a singular object, however, if your looking for not just a weak link, but The weakest link, one assumes you are investigating multiple interconnected links (i.e. a chain), in this instance finding your target link doesn't conclude the search, indeed, by finding and replacing/strengthening the weakest link, there must now be another that takes the lofty accolade of 'The weakest link'. Your task will never end.... Cheer up though, it will at least keep you busy :)
Twenty+ years ago, when I was a highschooler taking an IT internship (with the town educational system, coincidentally), I was keen and green and ready to find and tackle any computer problem I could get my hands on. A week later, my boss told me something I'll never forget:
"Kid, I know you think you have something to prove and you might just have a career in this. But if you have an engine where one part is made tougher than all the others, it tends to wear down everything around it and the system breaks down."
In other words, he was telling me that the strongest link breaks the rest of the chain. Uh, OK, I'll get right on that sir.
The real solution ... Doubt any government will let it happen.
In the UK, we call it PAYE - Pay As You Earn. Across the civilised world, it has various names. This is found wherever accountancy bodies have not lobbied to prevent it. It is simpler faster and more accurate than forcing everyone to screw up their own returns. It is, however, much cheaper. This is not acceptable in the Land Of The Fee.
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