ePass Falls Down, Goes Boom
Posted on March 7, 2007
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 58 views |
About a year ago I tried to use Canada’s ePass system to file my taxes, and blogged about what a brutally bad, buggy system it was. Two months ago Jonathan pointed out that ePass is prone to a number of basic security vulnerabilities. Amusingly, in both cases we were later anonymously attacked by commenters on our post who’s IP addresses traced back to Ottawa (hello ePass developers/maintainers).
This week the government has taken ePass offline, says the Toronto Star:
The CRA ordered its Efile, Telefile and Netfile services suspended after a malfunction was discovered in the agency’s database on Monday night.
CRA spokesperson Jacqueline Couture said the problem resulted in scrambled information in electronic tax returns.
For instance, in some cases the field for the social insurance number was instead filled in with a birth date.
The article continues:
Couture said there has been no indication that the problem resulted from hacking or a computer virus.
I believe that. The system is buggy enough that there’s no need to introduce extra attack vectors to explain away the problems.
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