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
    2019-09-21T01:17:18+00:00

    Unfortunately in my case my account did get hacked, the hacker got control of my hotmail account, and used it changed password for a cryptocurrency exchange account that registered with this email.  Very interesting the hacker seems be able to easily crack down arbitrary hotmail/outloook account. I assume when the hacker go through all my email, he found a few email forward to my email account shows that I registered a few other cryptocurrency exchange account with other email addresses (some of them were registered with hotmail/outlook account, some are not) , those hotmail/outlook accounts got hacked soon as well (again the hacker changed password of cryptocurrency exchange account that registered with this email), but email accounts other than hotmail/outlook remain safe. My password for each email account were comepletely diffrent and very strong.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-09-20T19:55:31+00:00

    Hello World, 

    as a Microsoft employee I will try to find the right answers for your concerns. As far as I know so far no one was hopefully hacked at all, but I need to find the root cause of the annoying reports with IMAP sync successfully even with MfA enabled, which shouldn't technically work at all. Please be patient for the final official answer on this threat. 

    Cheers

    Volker Leitzgen (MSFT)

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-04T11:12:51+00:00

    The same here

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-03T03:38:01+00:00

    Wt hard drive ? . dear i have two computers and 2 iphones  ... 

    And in the last 8 months i used one mobile and probably the two Pcs to sign in to my email ..

    And which setting do i need to change???

    and of course a cyber hacker can change my password if they need my email and steal all my information .. but im a very normal person and my email doesnt have that much if important info for them ... 

    wt information i should download ? And check by spyware antivirus etc.

    okay i can reset my devices to new ..

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