Unsuccessful sync attempts and a few unsuccessful sign-in attempts on MS account

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Unsuccessful sync attempts and a few unsuccessful sign-in attempts on MS account

Anonymous

I have recently seen a few unsuccessful sync and signon attempts. I had not been checking my Microsoft account so it could have been going on for a long time. They aren’t constant or frequent, but they are a concern. I know my email was in a few breaches

it’s almost impossible to avoid that these days. That is one of the reasons why I don’t want to change my email, I think over time it will be breached again. My password was not breached, as far as I know. I have a strong password created from a pw generator (24 random characters). I have 2FA set on my account and use authenticator as well and that is my question. I am not seeing corresponding requests from 2FA at the login attempts. Why would i not see that? I have also not received any notifications from Microsoft about unusual activity. The attempts are listed under recent activity.

I really don’t want to change my email at this point I’ve been using it for so long. I have read on the MS forum that I should be OK with two factor and a strong password. I’m just wondering why I don’t see any 2FA requests for all of these logons and wondering if I really do need to change my email id. I’ve also read that you could create a new alias but I don’t know how that works and what I would need to do to replace current email id. Any input would be appreciated thank you.

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4 answers

Answer 1

Anonymous

what happened on last sunday 3/7 @9:30 with these unsuccessful log ins???

I had over 150 attempts within the matter of 5 minutes from all over the country/and different countries.

this is very concerning......

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Answer 2

Hello DonnaT

As long as you keep your account secure and there are no successful logins, you are good to go. I happen to concur with you in terms of any new account would likely also be breached <IF> you use that email address to sign-up for things on any website which is the most way for hackers to get access to info.

The other choice you have is to maintain one email address for your regular email services and another just for the purposes of signing up for things.

Another approach you can use is to add a new alias to your existing account (we'll call it <Acct2>) , make it the <Primary alias> and then set the old email address (call it <Acct1>) so that it can't sign into your account. That won't prevent you from using Acct1 for emailing but you would need to login into your account using <Acct2>

Changing sign-in preferences is done at

https://account.live.com/names/manage

One of the most important things to remember is not to use the same email address/password for important accounts (i.e. Facebook, Paypal, etc etc) since the hackers will also try to access those accounts and not just restrict themselves to Outlook.com.

Also, keep one other very important thing in mind, if you delete an <Alias> address from an Outlook,.com account, that action is immediate and permanent - that email address can never be recovered.

Answer 3

>>

I have strong, unique passwords for each account.

<<

Then you are all set - just a case of having to put up with what has become normal these days. Just as a FYI, once a website has been breached , it gets sold over and over again on the dark web so this can happen in waves using a single breached database and not necessarily indicating there have been more breaches.

Answer 4

Anonymous

Thank you Karl. I have strong, unique passwords for each account.

I will think about email alias/alternate email.

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Unsuccessful sync attempts and a few unsuccessful sign-in attempts on MS account

4 answers