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
    2019-06-10T20:38:08+00:00

    I know this is a long time after the message was posted but I just had a ton of successful syncs from a lot of countries and I'm freaking out.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-06-03T19:38:10+00:00

    Same for me!

    Easy password???

    Well, Hasn't Microsoft been hacked internally??? 

    huummm Obviously I have changed password but too late... Everything seems to have been synced "somewhere" else.

    Bye bye Hotmail????

    What I see from the contact you had with Microsoft support is a joke!

    They claim we use VPNs? Indeed once I used Bitdefender VPN... Is it a non reliant company?

    In short.... Pfffff

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-05-09T13:51:10+00:00

    You Can Count Me In I am so tired of their belligerent response in customer service playing down the problem and saying that the users have leaked their own password when that was not the case.

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  4. 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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