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
    2019-01-31T07:21:37+00:00

    Same problem here, I thought all the attempts said unsuccessful but after changing my password they all now say successful. I hope its a cosmetic glitch and the attempts really were unsuccessful. I could find no evidence of tampering and I don't keep sensitive information in the account but this is scary in any case.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-01-30T16:50:13+00:00

    Same problem here. Also i changed my pass . Still sync with my old pass.... mobile. Wow what a leak. Anyone from hotmail for an answer? Login from china,oukraine,brazil . Thats to much for not beeing suspicious.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-01-26T08:44:17+00:00

    Same things started on my account a few days ago, unsuccessful syncs from countries like Ukraine, Vietnam, Indonesia... some use IPv6 instead of IPv4 so there is no location, happens everyday and its starting to scare me because I have this account for a long time, already changed my password, the only time I use automatic sync is to the windows 10 email application.

    Edit: I think I solved it by changing the alias of my account and making using the old alias not working

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-01-19T18:38:25+00:00

    Is it safe to delete my MS account? I moved on and made sure all the sites my email has been on has been removed and or changed.

    I don't like MS anymore and I'm dead worried.

    Like Microsoft please disable Email sync, there's a reason why it must be password only or no sync at all.

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