Privacy breach

Question

My account is being used by unknown person

***moved from Microsoft 365 and Office / Subscription, account, billing / For home / Android***

Answer 1

Dear Shrinivas Bhat1

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

Based on your feedback, your account is now being stolen by someone else.

Regarding your question, if the account's message has been modified by someone and you are unable to use it, you you need to restore your account first.

Microsoft has a dedicated customer service team that can help you resolve the issue, and they will do their best to help restore your account to normal usage.

To protect the privacy of our community members, the community team is unable to directly assist you in unlocking or verifying your account.

I will give you two ways to help you reach the appropriate service.

Get more information about locking and unlocking your account by filling out the form below.

https://www.microsoft.com/concern/AccountReinstatement

The following link can be used to contact the customer service staff of the account number:

1. Open a site link - Contact - Microsoft Support
2. In the box below "We will work for you at any time", enter MSA, click "Get Instructions", and then click "Contact Customer Service" below.
3. In this section, you need to register a personal Microsoft account

Note: You can only use a personal MSA to sign up, and the company account can't display the correct content. If the account cannot be connected, you can use a different account or create a new account to run;

4. Select "Other Products" in Products & Services, select "Manage Account Security" as the category, and click to confirm
5. You can select "Chat with support experts in the web browser" to access the chat window.

Once your account is back in use in the above manner, I recommend that you immediately change your password to a strong one, please consider the suggestions in the following document to improve the security of your account:How to help keep your Microsoft account safe and secure - Microsoft Support

To improve account security, consider turning on two-step verification for your account, see: How to use two-step verification with your Microsoft account - Microsoft Support

It's highly recommended that you use Microsoft's authenticator to sign in to your account: Use About Microsoft Authenticator - Microsoft Support

The last thing is to add as much security verification information to your account as possible, at least 3 or more, the more the better, the purpose of doing this is to make it easier to get your account back in the future after your account has been hacked.

At the same time, because your account has been hacked and stolen experience, although now your account after the implementation of the above way to ensure that the account will not be stolen, but because the hacker still holds your account name, and according to Microsoft rules, if the account for a short period of time multiple login failures, it will lead to temporary account blocking, and in order to put an end to this problem, does not affect your use, you can change the account alias through the to solve this problem.

To fix this issue, you can click this link to sign in to your Microsoft account https://account.microsoft.com/, click [Your Information]-[Account Information]-[Edit Account Information] You can add an alias to your account in this interface, please note that due to the potential risks associated with your current account, it would be better to create an alias that doesn't require authentication for Outlook/Hotmail, and set the added alias as the primary alias. You can then click [Change Login Preferences] below to uncheck the checkbox in front of your old account, this will make your old account name unavailable for login, which can prevent hackers from constantly logging in. Remember to keep the alias name for your new account. You also won't be able to log in to your account with your old account name. In our tests, you may still receive emails with your old account name.

Note: Usually, hackers do not attack the same account continuously, there is a duration of the attack, if your account does not exist for a long time, the hacker's automated attack script may no longer make access attempts. You can reset your original name to the main alias after a certain period of time, we usually recommend users to hide it for 3 to 5 days.

For more information about the alias change issue, see the link:Add Add or remove an email alias in Outlook.com - Microsoft Support

You can properly secure your account after resuming account use by simply following the above instructions.

Feel free to text back if you need further help.

Best wishes

Chris.S-MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist