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
    2019-07-31T09:27:45+00:00

    I just lost more money becasue of this. Not only can they sync they can bypass 2FA and log in. Its a complete joke its not getting addressed!!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-04-13T17:29:01+00:00

    This would explain it -- Microsoft claims that the support credentials didn't provide access to emails, but judging by the number of incidents noted here (and god knows how many that went unnoticed), it looks like they're lying.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/13/microsoft-support-agent-email-hack/

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-09-19T09:31:05+00:00

    Totally agree, even though I'm fairly sure it's ok it will be a long time before i feel comfortable trusting them on this, which might not be a bad thing in the long run.

    Not much they can do about the standards though, if they enhance security it might prevent some emails reaching inbox when they are supposed to, but there must be a better way

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-09-18T18:37:45+00:00

    According to MS non of my accounts were compromised despite the activity log showing as 'successful sync' after a password change, however they've not supplied any detail beyond that so I am still monitoring more frequently than usual. I've not seen anything of concern after six months from the first notification so I m fairly sure that the problem is a fault in the report but it can't be guaranteed at the moment.

    For me its significant that the only 'successful sync' are before the password change and everything since has been unsuccessful; that lends some credence to MS assertion that nothing was actually compromised - I would expect to see one or two 'unsuccessful' before the password change if the reporting were accurate.

    Well, the problem is if my emails were downloaded it would be a lot of worthless personal emails.  The needs to be a clear cut answer from support, were the many mega bytes of messages downloaded or not.  They will not say at all.

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