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
    2018-01-23T09:22:16+00:00

    I have the same problem,. Can someone from Microsoft please help!

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-23T14:58:28+00:00

    It happened because you had an easy to guess password on your account, you used the same password on a hacked website, or you have malware on one of your systems.

    I would suggest that you turn on multifactor authentication and be sure to have multiple devices setup.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-05-05T00:35:52+00:00

    I have the exact same problem since my sim card on my android got cloned.

    The hacker got access to my accounts (not just microsoft) through automatic syncing.

    After I changed my passwords everywhere, and after obtaining a new sim card,

    someone is still trying to sync to my microsoft account, and from all over the world as well.

    This has been going on for about 2 months, they just keep trying to sync to my account every other day.

    I wish I could just turn off automatic sync, but there is no way to do so.

    Very disappointing security, not sure how this can even happen.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-05-16T02:36:21+00:00

    I've had "automatic sync" show up in my "Recent Activity" numerous times - a couple of weeks later (seriously!) I've gotten a notification of "We think that someone else might have accessed (insert-mail address here)..."

    At which point I'm forced to change my password. Again.

    MS never actually tell me why they think someone else has accessed my account, and "Recent Activity" never shows any suspicious events within the preceding 24 hours or so.

    I have two-stage authorisation set up, and am using Authenticator. Just checked "Recent Activity", and there are four more attempts at Automatic Sync in the last few hours - three from Brazil, one from Malaysia. As I'm a resident of neither, you'd think Microsoft would automatically block them. Not so...

    It gets worse! Here's the Recent Activity showing the four attempts as being "unsuccessful":

    BUT... if I click on "Secure your account", the exact same events suddenly change to "successful":

    What on earth is going on?

    I'll confess that my Internet knowledge is scant and there may be reasons why not, but I'm an Australian living in Australia - literally ALL my legit account activity is from IP's based in Australia. If Microsoft detects an attempt to access my account from, y'know, the other side of the world, why would they allow it to proceed?

    If ALL my account activity is from, say, Sydney, then someone tries to login / automatically sync from Brazil, why wouldn't they automatically flag that as suspicious, and block it?

    Makes no sense to me...

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