Reset Windows Security settings to default values in Windows 10/8/7

There may come a time when you may want to or need to reset your Windows Security settings to default values. Maybe you messed them while configuring them manually or maybe your PC just recovered from a malware infection. If for some reason you’d like to reset all your Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 or Windows Vista security settings to their default values, you may do so as follows:

Reset Windows Security settings

Open an elevated command prompt and type the following command:

secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose

Hit Enter.

After you run this, the standard user accounts may no longer appear on the login screen when you re-start your computer or try to switch users.

This occurs because standard user accounts are removed from the Users group when you reset Windows security settings.

To add the affected user’s accounts back to the Users group, follow these steps.

Open an elevated command prompt. In the Command Prompt window, type net users and hit Enter. A list of user accounts will be displayed.

For each account name listed in the Command Prompt that is missing from the log on or switch user screen, type the following command and hit Enter.

net localgroup users accountname /add

In Windows10/8/7/Vista, the Defltbase.inf file is a Security configuration template for the default security. You can view the settings for this file in the following location:

%windir%\inf\defltbase.inf

You will see all changes made, in a newly created log file situated at the following location:

C:\Windows\security\logs\scesrv.log

If you don’t want to do it manually, you can simply use this Microsoft Fix it 50198 to let do all this, automatically.

NOTE: Security settings consist of settings defined in deftbase.inf augmented by settings applied by the operating installation process and server role installation. Because there is no supported process to replay the permissions made by the operating system setup, the use of secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbosecommand line may no longer be capable of resetting all security defaults.

How to Reset Windows Firewall settings to defaults may also interest you.