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

Anonymous
2017-12-27T07:24:23+00:00

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?

Outlook | Web | Outlook.com | Account management, security, and privacy

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Anonymous
2019-10-19T13:55:26+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2021-04-21T07:41:39+00:00

    Happened with me as well, at least the only thing they bothered to get into after the successful sync was my runescape account.  Too bad they stripped it completely..  Time to find out if there was anything else they managed to get into.

    Seriously there should be a way for us to disable IMAP syncing.

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-03-03T17:20:04+00:00

    I have the same issue now (03/03/2021) where my account shows attempted syncs however now they all appear as unsuccessful as I've changed my password. However, when my account did get hacked and had successful sync (back in October 2020) My account got locked and many of my other accounts. I've changed my password on most sites but on sites that I don't use anymore, I'm getting hacked even after changing my password. I know that I'm still being hacked as in February 2021 I received a 2FA apple id login request and then started getting spammed with different codes or something to my apple id iMessage. I've had to delete that apple ID to prevent anything from being taken from me. I've had my Gmail get hacked multiple times. It's extremely frustrating as surely this issue couldn't have been going on for the past 2 Years.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-11-23T21:32:34+00:00

    Thank you I'll do it

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-11-20T02:44:00+00:00

    I face the same thing. Easiest way, move to other providers and delete your Microsoft account. Their security is too weak even though they are a multi billion corporation.

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