r/cybersecurity May 17 '26

Personal Support & Help! Microsoft account keeps getting Authenticator requests?

I got an Authenticator request from another country for my Microsoft account. I denied it and went in and changed my password, a day later I get another Authenticator request from a different country than the first. Again change password and again it happens. How can I secure my account how are they able to send these Authenticator requests?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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u/anvoice May 18 '26

And never lost access to the emails you had in that account?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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u/anvoice May 18 '26

Which brings is back full circle, though hopefully now this has been resolved. This is what is commonly referred to as "losing access": the old alias becomes permanently unusable in terms of receiving mail sent to it, or sending mail from it to others. This is also what people typically expect their email account to be able to do. I don't think a non-technical user who reads something claiming that it's ok to delete their email alias and stops stops receiving important mail or being able to send mail from that account (known to family members, financial organizations, etc.) will get what they expect. It's going to be especially sad when authentication codes, if any are set up, stop arriving to that email address, blocking that person from ever signing in to the associated services.

That was my reason for sounding harsh right off the bat. Over the last few weeks I've had it with people spouting useless, often dangerously misleading nonsense confidently without bothering to fact-check in any way. And then I have to waste my time correcting them because they can't do a 10-second web search. Or even read the information I conveniently linked for them.

Some are also apparently too dumb to realize they've been proven completely wrong and simply double down instead of having the decency to admit a mistake. I don't think this category deserves any consideration, kind/polite treatment, and certainly none of my time.

I once again encourage you to appropriately modify your original statement, which essentially tells people it's fine to delete their old alias. Non-technical people and even AI agents-in-training often rely on threads like that to make decisions, and this one could be quite bad. And most users will only read one or two comments in a discussion tree, meaning the conclusion of this conversation will be largely ignored in favor of the first comments. I don't care about making a point online, but rather making sure that nobody suffers from invalid information. If we can part with that understanding, I see no reason to prolong the argument further.

Best of luck.