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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.
This is only a vulnerability if you suspect a threat actor might physically access your computer. For most people, this is not a concern. There’s also the issue that it has processing overhead, so it might make certain operations feel sluggish.
Encryption is not a panacea, because if someone ever forgets their password (something common for the layperson), the data on that drive is inaccessible. No chance for recovery. Certain types of software may not like it either. It’s one of many considerations someone should make when determining their own threat model, but this is not a security flaw. It’s an option for consideration, and most people are probably better off from a useability standpoint with encryption disabled by default.
I think it just really goes to show you can’t hide anything on a computer physically.
I also feel this is something that should be taught in school (maybe it is i finished school over 13 years ago)
I always knew there were ways to recover files off of hard drives. I just assumed they needed to be physically remounted not just plug in a usb and off you go
I think it just really goes to show you can’t hide anything on a computer physically.
What do you mean? It’s certainly possible when using encryption software such as bitlocker. It’s just not always enabled by default.In fact it’s saved my ass from total data loss a couple of times.
If you can make sure nobody has physical access to your pc than there’s a case to be made that you don’t need it, and if you can’t and are afraid that someone has both knowledge of this fact and the intention to (ab)use it, you use bitlocker.
Encryption is not a panacea, because if someone ever forgets their password (something common for the layperson), the data on that drive is inaccessible.
It’s because of stuff like this that Microsoft wants people to create an Microsoft account. Recovery key automatically saved to your Microsoft account. For business the recovery key can also be automatically saved in a central location.
Are you saying the performance hit is from running off an encrypted drive?
Given that AES instructions have been implemented directly in the CPU since 2008, any performance penalty should be negligible.
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
