All my passwords are "gone" from the PC?

Tim_108

Commendable
Oct 17, 2016
5
0
1,510
Win 7.

Started PC, Skype didn’t automatically sign in like it always do.

Opened Chrome, it felt like I all cookies, cache and passwords were deleted because I was logged out from every site that I normally am always automatically logged in on, YouTube, Facebook, Outlook, Google, Twitter etc.

So my Google account wasn’t logged in on Chrome anymore. I logged in and got all my stored passwords back in Chrome of course since they’re stored on Googles servers.

I have stored passwords for some VPS that I manage with Remote Desktop. These passwords were also “lost”: https://gyazo.com/0de433ba64d9d19ae7d85ee38237d41d

I checked my activity history in Outlook and no one has accessed my account. It seems like some registry file with passwords have been deleted from my PC or what is it that could have happened?
 
Solution
Changing your Windows account password can cause this. This is partially a security feature and partially because your stored passwords are encrypted based on your Windows account's password, so when you change that you're logged out of everything.
Changing your Windows account password can cause this. This is partially a security feature and partially because your stored passwords are encrypted based on your Windows account's password, so when you change that you're logged out of everything.
 
Solution
If you want to avoid this in the future you can use a password manager software (a trusted one) as those can both prevent this from happening (your passwords are still encrypted, just not affected by Windows) and also allow you to effectively use passwords impossible for attackers to guess (random sequences of characters).