Microsoft Pays $24,000 Bounty to Hacker for Finding 'Account Hacking' Technique
Oct 08, 2015
A security researcher has won $24,000 from Microsoft for finding a critical flaw in its Live.com authentication system that could allow hackers to gain access to a user's complete Outlook account or other Microsoft services. Microsoft's Live.com is the authentication system that everyone go through while attempting to authenticate to Outlook.com and a large number of other Microsoft services, including OneDrive, Windows Phone, Skype, and Xbox LIVE. Hacking Hotmail (Outlook.com) Account It's one account for all services. So, if say, Outlook wants to access other apps, it uses a standard set of authentication code called OAuth . OAuth is an open standard for authorization that keeps your passwords safe on third-party sites and instead of sharing your password, it shares a special key called 'Access token' to access the app. OAuth authorizations are accomplished through a prompt, as shown below and to allow an app to gain access to your account, you n...
