•
Following a simplistic hack at the Internal Revenue Service that permitted several thousand tax returns to be illegally accessed and refunds commandeered, the agency created an equally porous "fix" merely copied from failed security elsewhere on the IRS website. According to a March Washington Post report, the fix admirably added one level of security (a personal PIN), but nonetheless allowed anyone to change another's PIN using publicly available information. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Post that "only a handful" of taxpayers were victimized by the faulty fix (but later defined "handful" as "fewer than 200"). [Washington Post, 3-3-2016]
•
Murders are being committed over hair weaves, reported WMC-TV (Memphis, Tennessee) in March, with one likely explanation being a belief that a person who acquires tufts of human hair surely acquires the fortunes -- good or bad -- of the person who grew the hair. That is especially true of "virgin" hair from India, shorn for religious sacrifices ("tonsuring") before falling into the hands of agents who sell to Western women. Said a Memphis pastor, "A generation back or so," people were being killed over tennis shoes. "Now (it's) hair." [WMC-TV, 3-2-2016]