My Outlook account got hacked. E-mails leaked by IMAP automatic sync. How this happened?

Anonymous

My Outlook account got hacked. Have been using this e-mail account from the early days of Hotmail. E-mails leaked by IMAP automatic sync despite using different password than on other sites and having two factor authentication activated.

Got warning SMS from Microsoft and when checking recent activity, i saw multiple "Successful Syncs" listed from countries like China, Thailand, Russia, Poland, Brazil, Ukraine, Philippines, Kazakhstan and Iran. These syncs took place in two different times in four hour intervals. How could this be possible? Why Microsoft detected that something fishy is going on but allowed sync to be completed anyway? Doesn't IMAP sync have some kind of location based checks in place like when logging in into other MS sites and services?

Since then, I have changed the password of my account, unlinked Skype from my Microsoft account, deleted any active app passwords.

I see again some IMAP syncs in my activity tab and they are now marked as "Unsuccessful". Small consolation knowing that your whole e-mail history is already leaked into some Chinese servers :(

How this all could have happened? Is there a security hole in Microsoft's IMAP sync implementation?

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

Dear Tech community,

as far as we know now, there was an UX issue on the MSA recent activity page, where a subset of unsuccessful IMAP syncs are erroneously shown as successful. This bug should be fixed in a couple of days and we hope that no one was ever compromised.

Cheers

Volker

P.S.: IP addresses are translating to countries like Bangladesh, Brasil, China etc. A hacker can simply fake their source IP, therefore it is difficult to say, where the hack attacks are coming from. Please just keep using security best practices for your hotmail/outlook accounts with difficult passwords to be changed as often as possible and leverage multi factor authentication.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/11/20/sign-in-to-your-microsoft-account-without-a-password-using-windows-hello-or-a-security-key/

All other email providers have the same challenge to help their customers to secure their username/password authentications.

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224 additional answers

Anonymous

2019-03-05T17:26:16+00:00

after several failed Sync attempts MS tell you to change your password 'just in case' - when you change your password the Sync attempts re reported as successful because of a bug in the report page.
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Anonymous

2019-03-05T17:23:48+00:00

the change to 'successful' is a fault in the page when it updates after the password change
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Anonymous

2019-03-02T03:47:39+00:00

This is getting ridiculous, I've also had multiple sign in attempts with IMAP and POP3 from multiple IPs. They are unsuccessful, but when I change my password and I click, "Secure your account", it then changes to "successful sync." Is this just an error on MS' end? If so, how do you fix it? Is it possible for a hacker to bypass 2FA since I have it enabled?
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Anonymous

2019-02-25T09:21:14+00:00

I recently had an account have its password reset, and the only way that could have happened is if my @hotmail emails were accessed.

My hotmail account:

-Crazy strong password

-2FA enabled

-No app passwords

Lots of unsuccessful automatic IMAP sync attempts around that time from Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, Colombia, India, Mexico, Vietnam, United States, China....

I reckon they got in this way.
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