Suspicious activity details

[Samginj]

I was just locked out of my email due to 'suspicious activity.' I've regained entry without issue now, but I have no notification telling me what exactly this suspicious activity was, which isn't very helpful when it comes to figuring out if I ought to be concerned or if this is just a false alarm. I've double checked all my email settings and nothing looks out of place, there's no sent email I didn't write, etc.

My email account is attached to a BT account owned by someone else, and the owner of that account received an email notification about the security issue, but it sounds as though that email wasn't particularly informative or heavy on details either.

Is there any way I could receive more information on what the red flag was? Thank you.

[Crimliar]

Have you ruled out that the email account is attached to an account owned by someone else.  That could easily be suspicious enough to raise flags!

[Samginj]

I highly doubt that's anything to do with it, as I'd imagine it's fairly standard. Having a BT account from having them as a telecom provider, ISP, etc. lets you create multiple emails, so my email was created by the actual account holder years ago when we first joined BT as customers. The actual account owner received the warning to their own BT mail so it wasn't a lock out of every email associated to that account, just mine.

[gg30340]

Are you by any chance connected to the following forum user?

Password reset alert email about a family members ... - BT Community 

Regardless if you are or not you should follow do as I suggested in that thread if your email account has not been "gifted" to you.

As regards your issue It is most likely that somebody has been trying to access your account and entered the wrong password and as such the account was locked by BT.

This could have been malicious or it may be that the person has a similar email address as yours, perhaps one digit different, and they had been entering the wrong email address, ie yours by mistake and the wrong password which has triggered the lock.

[Samginj]

Not connected to that user, but the same situation! Thanks for the tip, I'll ask about having the account gifted to me.

Is a failed log-in attempt the most likely thing then? Pretty concerning. I suppose I can't be sure if that was a targeted attempt or a bot that scraped the email from somewhere just trying to brute force it.