More than 170 Australians have had their tax file numbers stolen by online scammers who captured the information from their home computers when they were using the online e-tax system.

The Australian Tax Office has issued a warning about the attack, but said the security breach was not specific to the Tax Office or the e-tax system.

A spokeswoman said the data theft had resulted from an attack on the victims’ own computers after they were infected by a trojan horse - which is similar to a computer virus.

The trojan is called Backdoor.Haxdoor.M and it steals information by recording the key strokes entered into the computers, including bank account numbers, passwords and other personal information.

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Source: SMH