Lost administrator rights on windows 10

Question

I was provided a Windows 10 computer for use at my workplace where I work as a PHP programmer.

My account used to be an administrator on the machine I am working on.

I recently had windows notifications that I had to change my password for security reasons, maybe some internal rule, and I did so.

I mostly have to change the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file when I have to create new virtualhosts on my localhost, but today, I couldn't save my changes as it states only "Error: Access denied". (The last time I had to change something on it -- and was able to -- was on 02/03/2018)

And as I also set apache as a service, I cannot restart it anymore using XAMPP, Services.msc or the Task manager.

After checking my account (the only one available on this machine as it looks like), it doesn't have the "Administrator" tag under my username anymore.

So I would like to ask if, either something on my machine may have caused that change, or a sysadmin changed my account settings from their machine?

Or does anyone know any way to have some kind of log on what happened to my account?

The sysadmins are looking for something to solve this issue, but I'd like to get a head start on what to check in case it was some local machine problem here.

Answer 1

Speak to your sysadmins.

It doesn't really matter 'how' this has happened (it's very unlikely that a program just removed your administrator access randomly), but as you're part of a domain your sysadmins will be able to confirm if you:

• Should have access
• How you can get access again
• How you can keep this access

We can't answer any of these questions, and if you don't know why you've suddenly lost admin access then you need to raise it with your sysadmins as it's a red flag when things happen on a system which you're not expecting.