Microsoft Says Someone Changed My Profile Information

I stumbled on this page after getting one of these "Microsoft account Your profile info changed" emails, and wondering like the rest of you "WTF"? I was able to track down the sequence of events that caused it, and sure enough, it's really from Microsoft, and it's really bogus. Ie: a bug in their system is issuing these emails. I'm not saying all such emails are bogus, by mine certainly was.

In my case I happened to be looking at this stackoverflow post here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/938987/getting-all-static-interned-strings-from-a-net-assembly-dll  in which helpful user vladob posted a link ("simple utility") to a file on skydrive.  I clicked on that, though did not download the file...  and continued with other work and browsing.

Some time later, of course no longer having skydrive on my mind, I see in my inbox "Microsoft account profile info changed"... the warning email in question. Of course I was alarmed, and spent the next while first suspiciously the email, logging in after manually typing the URL, changing the password and so on. I didn't notice that any profile info had changed, but thought maybe MS had backed out any changes when I indicated that it wasn't me that had recently "logged in".

Only later did I realize that the time of the email, and the time shown in Live's "Recent Activity" list for the supposed profile change, EXACTLY correspond to the time of visiting skydrive, as shown in my browser history.

I'm guessing that despite my not logging in to Live for probably months, when I did visit skydrive today it was able to read a cookie, detect that I had an account, and that triggered some chain of events that marked my profile as "changed", despite there not actually being any change, and my not actually logging in.

So, this laid to rest considerable anxiety that was provoked by this episode -- "who has managed to get my password" etc.   Thank you very much Microsoft for a false alarm and for wasting my time.

So I thought I'd at least recount this tale to prompt other unfortunates to consider causes like this, and to maybe prompt MS to fix this stupid problem.

-- Graham

Same here. IP adress: Removed PII which seems to be Microsoft IP

I got this email again.  This time from IP: Removed PII

Checking that IP it seems to come from Hotmail according to IP look up sites.

It would be good to know if this is something expected because it is not going to be viable for me to change my password every few days.

I also received this email on one of my accounts.

Looking at recent activity it says profile was changed from Removed PIIIP which gives the same lookup results as 65.55.142.203.

No, isnt that. The emails comes from Microsoft and appears as trusted emails and if you dont want to click on them you can just go to your settings and review the activity there. The thing is that there not profile change at all. The info and everything remains untouch but these emails still comming. I added more security and changed password and I also disabled x-notifier. I know that x-notifier isnt malware but the way of access to Outlook can trigger these emails as something may changed on Outlook side that makes that to happens (who knows). I will leave x-notifier off for a week to see and then enable again but only for one email account. Lets see what happens.