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.
Most Linux users run fully unencrypted drives as well. Its a vulnerability and a risk but its not a massive threat to the average person.
Idk if the average person is a laptop user but laptop users would definitely place a higher value on disk encryption.
Yes, any laptop without an encrypted storage drive will have its data accessible by someone booting from a live USB.
It really is a massive vulnerability, but it’s not well known because so few people even understand the concept of a ‘live USB’ to make it a widespread threat or concern.
So yeah, if you’re ever in possession of a Windows machine that doesn’t have an encrypted disk, you can view the users’ files without knowing their password via a live USB.
It’s also not limited to laptops.
This is not that big of a deal most of the time, since you are the only person interacting with your computer, but it’s worth remembering when you decide to recycle or donate – you have to securely wipe in that case. Also bear in mind, if you do encrypt your drive, there are now more possibilities for total data loss.
Oh, fun fact: you can change a users windows password inside Linux. Comes in handy for recovery, ie, user forgot their password.
And this is why we say physical access is root access.
Absolutely it’s crazy that it’s so simple that you can do it in the space of 5v minutes.
You should look into HDD platter recovery. There’s some really high quality stuff on YouTube.
Aw buddy.
Go look at the free software called autopsy
I’m happy that you’re on a journey of discovery. This is not an insult. The word is partition. Someone corrected me on the spelling of something last night. We all make mistakes.
(especially with reference to a country with separate areas of government) the action or state of dividing or being divided into parts.
Same in Linux. No disk encryption and everything is easy accessible if you have physical access.
Physical access wouldn’t seem so hard. Say you worked at the company company and wanted to get the files your boss has on your evaluation or something. Wait till they’re on lunch, plug in a usb and pull them up.
I imagine patient records wouldn’t be encrypted either
Any respectable company with Windows would be using BitLocker - full disk encryption. It’s super easy to setup if your computer has TPM, fully transparent for the user in most cases.
My work macbook won’t even let me mount an external storage device, but it doesn’t seem to care about my nextcloud client running in the background. Sorry for my blasphemous behaviour my cyber security comrades 🫡🥺
I imagine patient records wouldn’t be encrypted either
If computerised, they freaking well should be.
In general they’d be in a database with it’s own accesss control to interfaces and the databases data store should be encrypted. In my country there are standards for all healthcare IT systems that would include encryption and secure message exchange between systems. If they breached those they’d be in trouble.
If your doctor has a paper file in a filing cabinet on premises, written in English, then yes. The security is only the physical locks, just like your hme pc.
such a “hack” would only work in a poorly written tv show
an unencrypted drive is like being able to look into a bank though a window, not ideal but things of value could/should/would still be in a safe or somewhere else completely
That’s why you can’t just boot from an usb
Modern windows machines will be installed with bitlocker (full disk encryption). With manual installs it might not be.
I think Bitlocker isn’t even supported on Windows 11 Home. I was shocked when I wanted to set up disk encryption on my wife’s notebook.
It’s got like a “lite” version. You have to use the terminal to check if it’s enabled but that’s that Microsoft started doing in win10 home. I assume some asshat in marketing got the agreement they could keep their branding even if Microsoft gave out encryption for free.
Personally I found it made more sense to just bring an old pro license so I could be sure it was enabled.
I have a Windows 11 work laptop, I might try it out and see what happens
By the way, no different for Linux, if you boot off of USB you can mount partitions and access anything if not encrypted and linux windows, encryption is not the default.
This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).
It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.
If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.
It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO
No, it’s a choice, because:
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History… encryption didn’t exist in the beginning. Upgrades won’t enable it.
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Recovery… try telling the people that didn’t backup the encryption key - outside of the encrypted vault - that their data’s gone.
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Performance… not such an issue these days, but it does slow your system down (and then everyone complains)
So, please continue to encrypt your data as you choose and be less judgemental on others, esp. anyone new
No excuses.
I will definitely say I wish encryption setup was a lot easier in Linux. Windows is like “wanna Bitlocker?” Done.
With most Linux installers, if you’re not installing in a very default way, and clicking that box to encrypt the drive, it’s time to go seriously digging. For a while.
I managed to encrypt a secondary drive with the same password on my EndeavourOS laptop, but I still need to enter the same password 2 times before getting into the OS.
I consider that a feat, and I’m not touching it for fear of losing everything lol.
Yes, I feel your pain.
Encryption drives sound like a good idea until the subject of unlocking them comes up… and automatically unlocking the drive for the OS isn’t really helping.
But, for user data, it can be unlocked automatically during login. The Arch wiki covers this.
But backup your data 😉
Blah blah blah. Unencrypted data is the wrong default in 2025 for any OS. Linux should not be a poor man’s OS.
It depends on your use-case.
Encryption of data at rest (this discussion) is mostly helpful for physical theft, so a device that never leaves the house, there’s little reason for encryption.
Similarly, on a lower powered mobile device, maybe you only want / need user data to be encrypted, and there’s no need to encrypt the OS, which keeps the performance up.
Maybe you want the whole thing encrypted on your high performance laptop.
So, it’s difficult to define a sane default for everyone, thus making it an option for the end user to decide on.
Linux has more choice than Windows - and the encryption algorithm(s) can be verified - so it’s definitely the better choice.
You can’t enable encryption after the fact? What a backwards system…
For which OS?
It can be enabled at any time on Windows & Linux. It’s just optional.
It’s your bullet point number 1
That says that upgrades won’t enable it… the user can still enable it.
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Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).
it’s usually an option in the guided disk partition
If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.
Linux is about choice, not whatever someone else thinks it’s acceptable
Sure. But defaults are important.
Defaults are generally who do not want to understand in depth what they are doing (no offence). Example from other sphere: in R-Cran (used to write statistical models), some functions have defaults to either choose a particular algorithm or an optimisation value. I have heard almost about nobody among students, PhDs and even higher up the ladder, who took the time to understand what is happening below the shell. Instead these people took just the defaults, it worked (result was significant), done. However, if they may have chosen another algorithm, things may have turned differently, which would open up a box with many questions concerning modelling adequacy and understanding of data. It is the same with defaults in Linux.
Echoing Jubilant Jaguar’s sentiment about defaults mattering, I think that sometimes an excess amount of choice can be overwhelming such that a user is less empowered to make choices about things they do care about (Leading to a less steep learning curve). Sensible defaults need not remove anyone’s choice
I don’t disagree with the premise. I may disagree encrypted hard drive by default a sensible choice
If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.
When is the last time you carried your desktop outside? Forgot it somewhere?
I always turn on LUKS during install. The only exceptions are when I’m doing tests of different distros on my machine that I lovingly call “FuckAround”.
It really is the best way to find out.
While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.
This is entirely expected behavior. You didn’t encrypt your drive, so of course that data is available if you sidestep windows login protections. Check out Bitlocker for drive encryption.
I thought BitLocker was enabled by default on Windows 11, which is a terrible idea imo. Full disk encryption by default makes sense in professional settings, but not for the average users who have no clue that they’ll lose all their data if they lose the key. If I had a penny for every Windows user who didn’t understand the BitLocker message and saved the key on their encrypted drive, I’d have a lot of pennies. At the very least it should be prompted to give the user a choice.
This is true - it is enabled by default in win11. I disagree with you it being a terrible idea - imagine all the sentistive data people put on their hard drives - would they want to to fall in the wrong hands if they lose their computer? Or if their hard drives fails so they can do a secure wipe?
I’m not a fan of Microsoft, but they did solve the key issue in the enterprise setting by storing the key in they entrance identity. Same should be done for home consumers, since having a Microsoft account is being shoved in everyone’s throat anyway…
It’s a matter of perspective I guess. I’m not a fan of overkill security measures that get too much in the way of usability and risk creating problems for you, especially when physical access is a minor risk in most cases. I agree that having a Microsoft account to backup your key is a solution, but not a very good one since you trade vulnerability to a possible physical access that probably is never going to happen for the absolute certainty of your data being spied on by Microsoft…
Yeah, should be noted that bitlocker is only default enabled if you set windows up with a Microsoft account, since it then saves the recovery info on that account “in the cloud”.
If you set it up with a local account, you still need to enable it manually, so that you can save the recovery info somewhere else.
Windows does not let you save the key to the drive being encrypted. (Unless you access it via SMB share, which I’ve done a number of times during setup before moving it off.)
You mean it prevents people from writing the key on a piece of paper when they get the BitLocker message, then copy it on a text file once their session is running and throw the paper away or lose it later ?
Windows does support encrypted drives with Bitlocker, unfortunately Bitlocker’s default settings leave it vulnerable to many different attacks.
It’s the same situation with Linux just a simple login only has very basic protection you need to encrypt your disk if you want to make sure no one can read it.
so how is this not the default case in Windows?
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.
Yep! They don’t teach this stuff because consumer level cyber security is in the absolute pits of despair and moreover, they’re trying to do away with what little we have access to. Governments and police agencies like how easy it is to access files.
Personally I don’t bother with full disk encryption (FDE) since I don’t really have anything private on my main computer. Just a bunch of game files, comics, movies, etc. Anything extremely important such as tax documents, personal data, etc. is honestly very small and I keep in a little Proton Drive folder, <1GB total. I think the best approach is to simply educate yourself and be aware of what’s worth protecting and how best to protect that. Just enabling FDE and thinking you’re safe ignores all the other avenues that personal data can be stolen.
My current pet conspiracy theory is that FDE with BitLocker isn’t even worth it on Windows due to the TPM requirement. Why is that a bad thing? Your system probably has fTPM supported by the BIOS, why not just enable that?
Integrating with features like Secure Boot and Windows Hello for Business, TPM 2.0 enhances security by ensuring that only verified software is executed and protecting confidential details.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5283799 (I don’t believe we’ll see this EXACT implementation of DRM, I’m just providing an example of TPM being used for DRM and that these ideas have been in consideration since at least 2009).
Now, if I were Microsoft and I wanted to exert an excessive amount of control over your system by making sure you couldn’t run any inauthentic or “pirated” software to bring it more inline with the walled garden Apple approach they’ve been salivating over for the past decade+, you’d first need to ensure you had a good baseline enabled. You know, kind of like the thing you’d do by forcing everyone into an OS upgrade and trashing a lot of old hardware.
It won’t be instantaneous, I don’t know exactly how or what it’s going to look like when they start tightening their grip. Again, this is all speculation, but it’s not hard to connect the dots and their behavior over the past couple years does not give them the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is no longer a company that can be assumed to be acting in the best interest of the average consumer, they’re not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a “trusted platform”.
EDIT: Further lunatic conspiracy theories: BitLocker is/will be backdoored so Microsoft forcing you into that ecosystem further guarantees they have access to your system. This all stinks to me, like your landlord telling you how you can arrange the furniture in your own apartment.
they’re not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a “trusted platform”.
security in terms of Trusted Computing is never about your security, and neither about your trust
EDIT: Further lunatic conspiracy theories: BitLocker is/will be backdoored so Microsoft forcing you into that ecosystem further guarantees they have access to your system. This all stinks to me, like your landlord telling you how you can arrange the furniture in your own apartment.
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. Because you supposedly violated a license, or the terms of use or anything. just sayin’, Microsoft already has (and had for a few years now) a scandal about extorting for your personal phone number by locking down your account a few days after registration, until you hand it over. and even there they justify it with a ToS violation, which is just a lie
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?
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
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.
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
