Hackers Compromise Microsoft Support Agent to Access Outlook Email Accounts

If you have an account with Microsoft Outlook email service,
there is a possibility that your account information has been
compromised by an unknown hacker or group of hackers, Microsoft
confirmed.

Earlier this year, hackers managed to breach Microsoft’s
customer support portal and access information related to some
email accounts registered with the company’s Outlook service.

Yesterday, a user on Reddit publicly posted a
screenshot of an email which he received from Microsoft warning
that unknown attackers were able to access some information of his
OutLook account between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2019.
^[1]

Another user on Reddit also confirmed that he/she too received the
same email from Microsoft.

According to the incident notification email, as shown below,
attackers were able to compromise credentials for one of
Microsoft’s customer support agents and used it to unauthorisedly
access some information related to the affected accounts, but not
the content of the emails or attachments.

The information that a Microsoft’s customer support agent can
view is limited to account email addresses, folder names, subject
lines of emails, and the name of other email addresses you
communicate with.

It should be noted that since attackers had an alternative window,
i.e., access to customer support account, to partially look inside
the affected email accounts without actually having to log into
each account, even the two-factor authentication was not able to
prevent users’ accounts.

At this time, it is not clear how the attackers were able to
compromise Microsoft employee, but the tech company confirmed that
it has now revoked the stolen credentials and started notifying all
affected customers.

In an email to the Verge reporter, Microsoft verified the
authenticity of the notification email and confirmed the breach
saying:

However, Microsoft did not disclose the total number of accounts
affected by the incident.

Although the breach did not directly impact your email login
credentials, Microsoft recommended users to still consider
resetting passwords for their Microsoft accounts just to be on the
safer side.

“Microsoft regrets any inconvenience caused by this issue,” the
company says. “Please be assured that Microsoft takes data
protection very seriously and has engaged its internal security and
privacy teams in the investigation and resolution of the issue, as
well as. additional hardening of systems and processes to prevent
such recurrence.”

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