Microsoft Edge will load all your passwords into memory in plaintext, but Microsoft says it’s not a security concern

Microsoft Edge has been discovered to be storing all passwords in plaintext when loaded in memory upon startup, making the passwords much easier to read and scrape by malware or hackers. Cyber security researcher @L1v1ng0ffTh3L4N posted about the exploit on X, and says “Edge is the only Chromium‑based browser I’ve tested that behaves this way.”

“When you save passwords in Edge, the browser decrypts every credential at startup and keeps them resident in process memory. This happens even if you never visit a site that uses those credentials,” the security researcher claims. “If an attacker gains administrative access on a terminal server, they can access the memory of all logged‑on user processes.”