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
    2020-05-21T21:42:34+00:00

    in 2020 and I had the same problem my email was hacked using auto sync and all of my videogames releated accounts were stolen.

    the hacker got access to my messages and he sent a "forgot my password" for my steam account and when he recieved the email from steam to change the password he changed it and deleted the message to avoid leting me know that I got hacked.

    thank god I managed to get back all of my accounts and after that I secured my email with 2FA but I still have unsuccessfull syncing attempts.

    thank you microsoft

    UPDATE : there is one  IP from united states that keeps trying to sync and according to https://ipinfo.io website the IP belongs to Microsoft.

    IP: 20.178.23.94

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-05-19T20:29:33+00:00

    check your 2fa, my 2fa would be sent to my phone but would be sent via a phone number, instead of msft or veryfi, these texts were sent to me, but i received the text before they were sent???????????????? 

    very confusing considering my other texts come through at the time they  were sent

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-05-19T20:15:30+00:00

    microsoft will not entertain email hacks, its not there software, most of the hacking takes place in a shared address books, which is used in conjunction with a hyper link, the way i see the problem, 

    YOU HAVE NO SECURITY ON YOUR DEVICES, AND IT DOESN'T HOW MUCH YOU SPEND ON SECURITY EVERYTHING HAPPENS BY BYPASSINIG YOUR FIREWALL

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-05-19T20:02:29+00:00

    i think im on the same page my friend, nothing is secure from what i can make out, computers pass data to each other, the only reason they go wrong is because of human interferance, or a part of the system is faulty, or its been asked to do something that its not ment to do, this leads conflicts or faults, bear in mind when you have a hyperlink put on your account(hyper links are legal)  all of our personal infomation is up for grabs

    HYPERLINKS bypass your firewall

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