Ask Lemmy

It goes without saying that you should change your passwords immediately. Do you use the same password for multiple things? If so, stop that.

To add on, it sounds like you were phished. No shame, it happens to everyone. The best course of action when you get an email like that, DONT click the easy to press recover account button in the email. Always go directly to the site, even if the email looks legit.

From there you entered your password into, what im assuming, was a fake Macys website, where you gave the bad actors the exact info they needed to really activate it.

To add on to everyone else mentioning it, another benefit to password managers is that they auto filter themselves to the URL. So if you have a password saved for macys.com and get phished to macys-passwordreovery.com, the password manager won't know the URL and offer no filtering. Adding the extra step of having to manually find your password entry should be a flag itself that something might be wrong.

Firstly, probably remove the address from the OP. Don't want any Lemmy vigilantes getting involved and making a mess of things.

If you have 2fa enabled, you should be good. Even if they do guess your password, they shouldn't* be able to log in to your account. Although might still be worth making sure you have a nice strong password anyway. Also, if you have recovery phone numbers or email addresses attached to your email account, make sure they're secured as well.

* Assuming that your webmail provider is doing everything correctly, which isn't always a given if they're a small one.

Check if your email service has an option to log off from all devices first. This will close any active sessions and prevent anyone that might be already logged in to do anything without logging in again.

Then change your password.

If you have 2FA, try to use something like an authenticator app instead of a cell phone number to receive an SMS message. Sim cards can be cloned. Authenticator apps can't.

Are you also getting a bunch of random "confirm your email address" or thank you for signing up" emails?

This sounds like it may be part of a registration bomb attack. I woke up to over 4,000 similar messages a little while back. What they were doing is hiding their actual activity by flooding my inbox. Among the thousands of emails was a notification about the new user added to my PayPal account that had been compromised. That user was trying to empty my bank account.

I caught it before any damage could be done, and the registration bomb ended shortly afterwards.

I would contact support and report that address to the police. Other than that check https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and change your password to something unreasonable with >1000 characters or close to the limit of what they allow.

With hotmail/outlook, you can tighten up the security a bit, and stop the login attempts.

You can add an alias to you account, and then remove the permission to log in(dont actually remove it completely) from your original email. You will still recieve all the e-mails, and will work like normal, but your sign in will be different.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-or-remove-an-email-alias-in-outlook-com-459b1989-356d-40fa-a689-8f285b13f1f2

May not apply here but

Note sometimes fraudsters use email bombing when they place orders on an account of yours. They want you to miss the order confirmation/shipping/pickup notifications.

Imagine if they put their brainpower to real jobs

There is nothing you can do about the unsuccessful logins to your email address. My original email address has been in so many hacks and it's always being brute forced by hackers outside the US.

You already have MFA, so the only other thing I can think of is to have an incredibly long random password on your account and make sure the "forgot my password" recovery flows don't have any easy way to bypass. Things like another email address as a backup that's less secure, being able to guess your personal details based on past hacks, easily guessable/researchable security questions (make these random or nonsensical if possible, or don't put details from security questions in social media) could be used to gain access, even with MFA. And finally, secure your password manager in a similar manner.

Password managers such as Bitwarden have password generators that you can use to make on the fly secure passwords (example: gnb*a&2$d9Uzej). You should ideally make the max length that the individual sites supports. Use that for every important account, especially your main email address, especially the one you use for your phone if you are on Android.

Likely that email or a previous email you clicked on was a phishing attack and when you logged in you gave them your password. And if you used that password anywhere else, you let them into those accounts as well. Make sure to check the links in emails are actually pointing to the expected web address and never click through warnings about SSL certificates being invalid. Better yet, never click on email links. Go into your web browser and type in the address manually. And use a password manager with unique, random passwords for every website and use a strong password and a 2FA method that requires access to a physical object or biometrics (cell phone text messages don't count as a physical object). If you still have trouble then it could be that your 2FA method is compromised. If you're using a cell phone, for example, it's possible your neighborhood is the target of a stingray or similar device that mimics a cell tower. Turn off 2G if you can. But even then, that only eliminates a subset of the devices. Get a yubikey or use other, more secure, 2FA methods and be sure to disable the less secure 2FA methods, because you're only as secure as the least secure one.

Like others have said, change your passwords, activate 2FA if available, never reuse passwords etc, etc, etc.

I have been getting repeated warnings for unsuccessful logins to my Microsoft account for some time now. I'm guessing some bad actors are just throwing whatever leaked passwords they have hoping for hits. I have 2FA turned on and a password complex enough to deter dictionary attacks, so I'm not really concerned.

I am currently using the iOS password manager. I have my qualms with it but it’s been mostly pretty solid. I was an android user for years and used a fair share of password managers, I like the iOS one the best but I know some of the new managers are much better. I don’t know any other iOS compatible password managers. I’m open to suggestions.

Also every account that uses 2FA has either an Authenticator code or email to an authentication secured email address.

After logging into Macy’s I got 43 emails at once to seven different services like “Excalidraw” and “Sportograf” trying to login using a magic link.

If you never use this kind of signin method, I'd make a rule to automatically delete those emails with the magic link so that you don't accidentally use them.

Other than that, a secure password and 2FA are your best defenses.

First, same advice as everyone else. Change your passwords. Password managers are great. I like keepass.

Regarding the email, this looks like a Hotmail/Microsoft/Outlook account. Their security page sucks ass. It lists every time someone unsuccessfully tries to log in. "Unsuccessfully" as in they tried your email with an incorrect password. Of course hackers are going to try to break into your account. You really only need to worry about successful logins that aren't you.