Like the title says, I’ve got yesterday an email with a code to access my Microsoft account and that made me suspicious because I wasn’t trying to login to my account. When I looked at the login attempts I saw that someone else was trying to access my account, I changed my password, activated TFA. Thinking of going through and buying a physical key like yubico to further secure my account. Any tips are appreciated.
did you report it?
Same here, I have been in the same situation for years. Looks like if you email appears in a data breach every hacker in the world tries to get access to your email. Just never reuse your email password and set 2FA. That’s more than enough to prevent unauthorized access and don’t lose sleep over it.
I got a notification from my original Xbox account from 2008 saying someone had managed to crack the password and needed the 2fa code.
I went to check on sign in activity and holy shit I knew that email account had been leaked long ago but I was not prepared for dozens to hundreds of sign-in attempts EVERY SINGLE DAY, from all over the world (at least I assume places that are popular VPN outlets)
That account doesn’t have a single thing on it. No games, no cards, it was never even connected to the internet except the rare occasion when I was at a friend’s house. And I don’t re-use passwords except on throwaway accounts. So they would have been quite disappointed by it.
But just to be sure I changed the password again on all my big accounts or accounts with cards attached just in case.
Someone hacked my account using an SMS exploit from Russia last week
As long as you have 2Fa setup via a yubikey or phone app, and it via sms or email, you should be fine, they will give up eventually.
Happened to me too yesterday. Gave me a big bump to my evening plans. Luckily I too have 2fa activated via 2 different systems {SMS AND second Mail address). They cracked my randomly generated password - which doesn’t surprise me that much, brute force cracker are pretty effective nowadays.
What bums me is that I used this as an argument to teach a friend but he just used the same ol’ reliable “naah, I’m too lazy”. Can’t change him, just told him to think about using 2fa everywhere money is involved. The rest is up to him.
What’s also pretty bad from MS is that yes you can use several different mailadresses but no you can’t prevent that all of them can be used as login. One is compromised but also used for mail traffic so I can’t just delete it. But also can’t prevent it from logging in to the account. Thanks MS…
They cracked my randomly generated password - which doesn’t surprise me that much, brute force cracker are pretty effective nowadays.
I’m actually surprised that it’d be feasible to use a brute force approach to gain access to an online account. I would expect them to hit some kind of rate-limiting long before they’d find the correct password
Hey so you actually can make it so an email address doesn’t log into the account, it’s how I stopped one particularly persistent hacking attempt when they finally managed to crack my password but were stopped by 2fa. Go to your profile > account info > sign in preferences, then as long as you have an alias email on the account you can deselect ones that you don’t want to be able to be used as a log-in.
With Microsoft I couldnt figure out how to enable 2fa against minecraft. Seems they do not have 2fa of any kind there and that is linked to your microsoft account. I guess the permissions there are just for minecraft, but if I was a betting man, I would venture there is a big hole there.
What kind of randomly generated password did you have that was crackable? I usually use 30 characters completely random string. If that’s crackable, maybe I need to rethink things.
You should enable passwordless auth with number matching.