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

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
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
    2019-05-09T12:21:17+00:00

    i encourage everyone to keep posting about this issue if you're affected, we need Microsoft to take this seriously. They have now acknowledged they've been hacked but i fear they are hiding the true extent of the hack, we need some real answers and investigation from Microsoft, our data has been leaked, stolen, compromised and identity put at major risk, exchanged on deep web databases, etc all out of our control since we all did our best to make sure our accounts are safe, but if microsoft cannot protect their own systems and protcols, then it is out of our hand it is 100% their fault! We need to pressure Microsoft, this is unacceptable!

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-04T13:00:09+00:00

    It seems that this is not goin to be fixed... Well, i think is time to change email, it happened to me 12 days ago and a few hours ago apeared again, this time unsuccesfuly AND the past 2syncs just dissapeared... Fuh...

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-04-20T08:17:39+00:00

    Hi everyone, it's looking increasingly likely that Microsoft is hiding the extent of the hack. It seems most of us affected here is due to the recent reported hack. Keep in mind intially Microsoft played down the hack until motherboard exposed them so they admitted to it. Microsoft says it a "minor" user base that was affected but i don't think that's true, most people are probably not even aware they were hacked. 

    Their support when contacted continued to blame us for a long time despite us reporting this to Microsoft for a while now. Hackers were able to read and download our entire email history, make changes to our outlook settings (e.g adding certian rules, etc), our identity and online security is at serious risk. This is unacceptable, Microsoft sent a notice and that's it ? i believe some form of serious investigation and action should be conducted.

    There are 10K views on this thread and 400 users with the "Same question" , this is no minor incident

    Some articles about this topic

    https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/microsoft-outlook-emails-hacked-hotmail-msn-live-hackers-a8870566.html

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/15/18311112/microsoft-outlook-web-email-hack-response-comment

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-04-16T10:20:08+00:00

    They are still getting your emails trust me. I have a work around so they cant get new emails but when I set this up they LOGGED in and changed my settings allowing them to again get my emails. Its a total mess really.

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