Flash Drive demolished?

I have a 2GB flash drive which had lots of information and important files. I have them backed up somewhere safe, but here's my problem...

The flash drive was plugged into the computer at the time when lsass.exe crashed and did a 60-second countdown for shut down. Once it restarted, my flash drive was completely cleaned out. It had password protection on it and even the password was cleared out to nothing.

Is it possible that a hacker got access to my computer and copied these files, then completely destroyed them? (I used an undelete utility, by the way... didn't work) If it wasn't a hacker that got onto my computer, why would my flash drive be cleared out like it is?

I also looked online about lsass.exe (LSASS.EXE) saying that a worm/virus could have manipulated the code in lsass.exe, allowing a hacker to gain access or something like that? Any thoughts on this?

Flash Drive demolished?stinger

Mine has done the same thing, but w/o the lsass.exe problem. My dad, and engineer, suggested that it would be like you pulled the flash drive out of the computer while it was saving or extracting a file. Sometimes the computer will glitch up on the programs and erase them. I'm not saying this is the cause but I hope it helps.

Good job backing up your data. :) You should do it regularly if you want to keep the data you have in case something like this happens again.