Microsoft. Unusual activity on your account

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I have a hotmail email addresses that I’ve had for donkeys years that I barely use and can’t remember the last time I logged into.

Just recently (maybe the last 6 months or so) I’ve been getting these messages on occasion. Not very often, but often enough that it’s annoying.

At first I changed my password, and made it incredibly strong using 1Password and a series of number/letters/special symbols. Something that I could never remember thinking someone was/is trying to gain access to my account. I’m still unsure what’s going on.

Ive since changed my password several times, but sure enough after a short period of time, these ‘unusual activity’ emails start poppting up again. Microsoft say they block the attempt each time to gain access.

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Anyone had any experience of this?

I’m assuming it’s some kind of scam.

My work recently moved from Lotus Notes to Office 365 and we’re a large company so have many distribution lists and they all got hit by this - definitely a scam and we were told by IT not to click on it and just to report as spam and delete it.

I think I’ve had about 25 of them now.

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Aha, yes I’m going on for that many too. Thanks for that

As @gatehousejohn says, it is more than likely a phishing attempt.

The email address is irrelevant, as this can be easily faked. The key giveaway will be where any of the links in the email go. Not that I’m advising actually clicking on any of them, but if you look at the source you’ll be able to see if they’re genuine Microsoft links or if they’re “honestly we’re really a Microsoft site, trust me, bro” links.

For the benefit of anyone else who may be reading: if you ever get an email like this, even if you believe it may be legitimate, it’s always better to go to the site yourself rather than clicking any of the links, so you can be sure you’re logging in to the right place. Then you can either carry out any fixed securely, or be assured that there’s nothing to fix and the email was a wrong 'un.

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It might be worth checking out the Recent Activity page to see if there have been sign on attempts. My account was targeted a while back and they got in as well. Lots of attempts from China & India. I changed to a super secure password and turned on Two Factor Authentication and it seems to have stopped now.

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I’ve got attempts from Russia logged and Zimbabwe

I don’t get this but what I do get in my disposable Yahoo! Mail account inbox is Google Critical alerts saying someone has tried to log in to my Google account but it shows my Yahoo! Mail lol