My Outlook account got hacked. E-mails leaked by IMAP automatic sync. How this happened?

Anonymous

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?

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

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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224 additional answers

Anonymous

2020-05-16T22:15:38+00:00

Who do I talk w because of fraud w microsoft
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Anonymous

2020-05-16T22:16:57+00:00

need help w fraud w microsoft
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Anonymous

2020-05-16T22:30:05+00:00

need help w fraud w microsoft

have fraud complaint w microsoft
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Anonymous

2020-05-16T23:46:11+00:00

As you can see he real bust making selling credit reports and data on me ,you and your family , he knows where he work ,where you live even family where pay your bills ,your electric company , they work together, Facebook ,Google and Microsoft, this is list of Microsoft , https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-search.html?term=Microsoft&page=1 you by your credit report , your kids ,wife , family they got ever place you lived down to old traffic tickets ,arrest , anything , it all reported to the company you work for . and the company pays 700.00 to 800.00 to keep track of you it all on their page . All this hacking it them look at Google , https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-search.html?term=Google&page=1 same problem , look at Facebook same problem , https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-search.html?term=Facebook&page=1 steeling our information
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