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
    2019-09-03T00:52:29+00:00

    if they got into your hard drive ,they can change ever setting and sync it to their computer system and if they want ,they can change your passwords the cyber hacker has access to any email you log into . change your settings and download Webroot with Antivirus and upgrade your firewall and look into your pop server outlook email . you might need to download your information check it spyware and virus and malware and last reset your computer back to new .but i go into safe mode first and run your antivirus from their , do that ,restart press the F8 key and when it restarts it be in safe mode run your mouse down to safe mode and click . hope this helps

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-09-02T15:02:04+00:00

    One more question if u plz .. if u download wt i need from this email .. i mean some folders .. or even i send to other emails.. can they get into my other email ? Which i send to ( my gmail ) / or is it better to download every thing locally

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-02T15:00:15+00:00

    But it says unsuccessful .. and no need to change the password ( even i changed everything and as i told u in my other reply i did every thing .. however .. wt do they need with my email its full of Ads and stupid things

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-02T14:58:29+00:00

    I changed every thing and i even moved from my place so my ip will be changed ( changed also service provider )  .. But my issue is a bit different than the person who wrote the complain .. in my case it shows .. they tried to get in but they failed ( and this was in parallel to the time my netflix account was stolen from indunisia , cause it says that some body have tried to log into ur email by some online services .. on all cases i cleaned everything .. deleted all .. and soon i will close this account

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