Safari Passwords. Urgent! All my passwords are in it!

Question

Help! Forum,
I recently damaged my internal hdd for my macbook and when to order a new one, then my service centre loaned me a internal hdd for the time being, then on the first day, i signed in to my paypal, facebook, hotmail, google etc, then i forgot to reset safari, i forgotten if did i click remember my password. So next day, i when to school, switch on my mac, the blinking question mark sign appears, thus, the repair man took it back. And i left my mac there. Ok, i wanna ask is that will my password in my safari be gone? Or when the disk is repaired and the next loaner who use it will see my passwords?
I need help!
Thank you.
Ala.

Answer 1

The answer is that Safari doesn't store your passwords. Rather, Safari communicates with an encrypted database called the Keychain to store and retrieve passwords. There's one keychain database, the Login Keychain, which is created with a key that is the same as your login password. To retrieve your password data, someone would have to guess what your login password was. Changing the password won't give them access, they need to know your password (or at least figure it out).
So, your passwords, if stored, are stored encrypted. How hard to retrieve them will depend on what your login password was. If it was 'password', someone determined enough could likely stumble across it eventually. If your password was 'X8t$$3a7TY', chances are that they'd never guess it.