Today i took my first steps into the world of Linux by creating a bookable Mint Cinamon USB stick to fuck around on without wiping or portioning my laptop drive.

I realised windows has the biggest vulnerability for the average user.

While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.

After some research it appears drives need to be encrypted to prevent this, so how is this not the default case in Windows?

I’m sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.

  • audaxdreik@pawb.socialEnglish
    3·
    17 hours ago

    For those not in the know, “Trusted Computing” is a very specific THING and maybe not what you’d expect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

    TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also against its owner, leading opponents of the technology like free software activist Richard Stallman to deride it as “treacherous computing”,[3][4] and certain scholarly articles to use scare quotes when referring to the technology.[5][6]

    You can pretty much guess where I land.

    a backup of your bitlocker key is in your Microsoft account, and normally nowhere else. It’s pretty easy for Microsoft to lock you out of your ow computer and data completely, if they wanted.

    You make a good point, I’m missing the forest for the trees. Why even bother theorizing that BitLocker may be compromised when they’re removing local accounts for consumers and forcing the key to be uploaded to their servers anyway?

    • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Why even bother theorizing that BitLocker may be compromised when they’re removing local accounts for consumers and forcing the key to be uploaded to their servers anyway?

      yeah, with that, it’s basically compromised, but maybe not bitlocker itself but the key storage

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      17 hours ago

      They’re not forcing it. You can still create local accounts (though it takes some work) and it doesn’t require you to upload any keys. I have bitlocker enabled with a local account and no Microsoft account connection.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
        11·
        2 hours ago

        they are forcing it. if you are not determined, you won’t be able to get an offline account. many are not determined. many don’t even realize that it’s not for their benefit, even after onedrive starts announcing it daily that their drive is full