Microsoft Account Security

What is this all about? Viewing my Sign On Activity from the Microsoft Account Security tab, I see an endless list of Unsuccessful sign-in attempts mostly from China)!

JeffLeites said:

What is this all about?

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Serious question? People trying to exploit other peoples lack of security is age old.

It’s pretty common.

Google would tell you the same thing

“unsuccessful sign in to my microsoft account”

And although mathematically correct, in your screenshot, China was only one more attempt than either America or Brazil.

Most of the attempts to get into my private stuff, come from the Vatican.

Many services such as Onedrive have a well defined endpoints for authentication. From a user perspective that is the web portal https://onedrive.live.com as well as programmatic endpoints for APIs and integration. There are countless data breaches happening almost everyday with some bigger named ones that show up in the news and plenty more that do not.

Often these breaches result in large datasets of user data and these are sold on darkweb forums with some cybercrime groups specializing in what's known as IAB (Initial access brokers) where they will collect these datasets and then test them against all sorts of SaaS applications and other services. When they find valid credentials to services they will sell these on mentioned dark web marketplaces.

There are also malicious scanning endpoints that will just scan and test credentials which may include these stolen data sets and this happens 24x7x365.

TLDR
Your email was likely either scraped or was compromised in one of these breaches and these scanners or IABs are crawling services testing out creds and/or your email with weak password combos.

Everyone has the same issue. This is my last 24 hours "activity". Just make sure you have a good, strong password.

Yikes! Squeaky clean here.