HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) claims that a recently-introduced crack down on cybercrime has already reduced the number of \u2018phishing scams\u2019 purporting to be from the Revenue by 300 million.<\/p>\n
The news comes shortly after the tax authority announced that it would be the first Government department to introduce and develop digital systems geared at tackling the growing problem of fraudulent emails which attempt to trick unsuspecting victims into handing over sensitive information.<\/p>\n
Reports from last year suggest that as many as 500 million opportunist \u2018phishing emails\u2019 were sent to taxpayers during 2014\/15.<\/p>\n
According to reports, HMRC\u2019s new security process is able to determine which email servers are allowed to send emails on behalf of the Revenue.<\/p>\n
Each email is subject to a series of checks and \u2013 if it passes \u2013 the system will deem it \u2018safe\u2019 to be delivered. If it fails, the system will deem it \u2018fraudulent\u2019 and the message will not be delivered.<\/p>\n
HMRC\u2019s head of cyber security, Ed Tucker, said: \u201cBy introducing a new level of security, we\u2019ve been able to tackle [cyber] threats head-on and almost all attempts to scam taxpayers by pretending to be from an HMRC email address will now fall flat.<\/p>\n
\u201cPhishing emails are a major focus for our cyber security team. They\u2019re more than just unwanted messages; they are a means by which criminals look to exploit members of the public and gain access to their personal and financial data.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis in turn can lead to fraud and identity theft,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) claims that a recently-introduced crack down on cybercrime has already reduced the number of \u2018phishing scams\u2019 purporting to be from the Revenue by 300 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1637,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions\/1637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bainesjewitt.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}