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.
It actually is now
And people are pissed because they don’t realize, and when they don’t have the key any more, all their data is gone!
The encryption key is stored remotely and can be retrieved through the Microsoft account
That assumes they know which Microsoft account it was attached to, the password, and have another device to access that account and retrieve the recovery key. If they did the setup five years ago, they’ve probably forgotten all that info.
IIRC, this is one of the reasons that Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0, so that the drive can be encrypted using the TPM as the key.