When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed the new Windows AI tool that can answer questions about your web browsing and laptop use, he said one of the “magical” things about it was that the data doesn’t leave your laptop; the Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five seconds and saves them on the device. But security experts say that data may not stay there for long.
Two weeks ahead of Recall’s launch on new Copilot+ PCs on June 18, security researchers have demonstrated how preview versions of the tool store the screenshots in an unencrypted database. The researchers say the data could easily be hoovered up by an attacker. And now, in a warning about how Recall could be abused by criminal hackers, Alex Hagenah, a cybersecurity strategist and ethical hacker, has released a demo tool that can automatically extract and display everything Recall records on a laptop.
Dubbed TotalRecall—yes, after the 1990 sci-fi film—the tool can pull all the information that Recall saves into its main database on a Windows laptop. “The database is unencrypted. It’s all plain text,” Hagenah says. Since Microsoft revealed Recall in mid-May, security researchers have repeatedly compared it to spyware or stalkerware that can track everything you do on your device. “It’s a Trojan 2.0 really, built in,” Hagenah says, adding that he built TotalRecall—which he’s releasing on GitHub—in order to show what is possible and to encourage Microsoft to make changes before Recall fully launches.
I wouldn’t really call it a hacker tool any more than you would call a hammer a thieves tool.
It just accesses the data that stored in an unencrypted format on the computers hard drive.
If someone had remote access to your computer they could use this, but I imagine they could also use the official tool too.
Since the data is stored in an unencrypted fashion, a hacker who had remote access would be better served running some script that will just transfer all this data to their offsite server and could be accomplished pretty easily.
I guess what I want to really say is that calling it a “hacker tool” is misleading.
I wouldn’t really call it a hacker tool any more than you would call a hammer a thieves tool.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure a hammer is a thieves tool if used in the commission of a burglary.
Those devices used by employees to remove security locks from CDs/DVDs aren’t “thieves tools” when used as intended, but when my dumb ass got caught with one while stealing from Blockbuster, the judge considered it one.
Nmap is a “hacker tool” and all it does is ask computers what ports they have open, something they are set to advertise to the world.
This is a “hacker tool” in the sense that it is accessing data in an unintended way, in the same contect as nmap using protocols intended to communicate for a set purpose to built a list of possible attack vectors.
So when I walk past some bicycles parked outside of a store, and simply use my eyes to determine if they have locks, I’m essentially a hacker.
You do have a point, but it does highlight why Microsoft’s framing is bad.
Microsoft is basing their approach to this on the concept that your MS account-secured local machine is itself secure, so whatever is in it is fine, because hey, your confidential work info is probably also in your hard drive and unencrypted, so if a bad actor can steal the pictures of it, then it can also steal the original document.
Which mostly is true, to be clear, but it fundamentally misunderstands how much juicier and easier of a target is a reliable, searchable database that logs all activity stored in a consistent location, as opposed to potentially having to extract everything up front. Plus, even if there are few guardrails to all data inside your system, there are some, as this will likely include info you may keep hidden, password-protected or encrypted both locally and remotely. There’s a reason my password manager asks for my credentials manually once every time I use it.
Cool, now do remotely.
Done https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/112555262732490331
And since it lives in user space without needing nt/system, it should be as stealable over remote as any other file
HacKeR tOOl
What exactly can recall see? Is it just what’s on screen?
Because, if I’m like most people when I type my password, I keep my passwords hashed on the screen as I type it.
Do you do any online banking? Do you ever log into any sort of health provider website? These are just two examples of a nearly infinite list of highly private information you would not want other people seeing.
Good points. I can see a few workarounds for this.
Stop using such services on a copmputer and go back to the old way of banking, going there physically.
Most normal people won’t use Linux, where could they go? Besides Windows? Chromeos? Probally not Google may copy and paste the concept of recall there. Mac os is too expensive, and Linix is complex to install. Where do normies go?
Why on earth aren’t they encrypting the database? It could have adressed much of the criticism but they just decided to leave the whole thing completely unprotected.
Likely because there was too much CPU overhead decrypting and having the LLM query the Recall image database all dynamically
It could be that anything you encrypt has to have its encryption key in some place inaccessible to these same hacker tools. If your computer uses Bitlocker, for instance, you need to enter a 6-digit code each time you turn it on.
Best guess, they had such a high expectation of “convenience” for this feature that they couldn’t justify any kind of security key. Which is still a dumb explanation, obviously.
It requires full disk encryption doesn’t it? If someone already has access to your account then they can access this data the same way you can. The new issue here is that this silos a load of private data in one easy to grab location. Users would have to set up the filters perfectly to prevent recall capturing anything more sensitive than what’s already accessible to their account. This is in a world where many users are probably storing their passwords in a Word document on the desktop.
Yep. Trying to maintain a consistent startmenu for computer labs with Windows 11 is annoying.
The layout is stored in an encrypted file that cannot be editted directly. You have to manually setup the start menu on one profile then copy the file to all the others. This works fine for intial deployments, but is a massive pain if you need to add any other apps later.
The old powershell commandlet for importing layouts does not work in Win11. The old group policy settings don’t work either. The actual DLL calls used by the end user to manually configuring the start menu are deliberatly coded to prevent being called from a script.
It is freaky how much work Microsoft has done to prevent scripting changes to the start menu.
The only officially supported method for an IT department to manage the start menu is intune, but microsoft’s device licensing for intune is a mess out folks have yet to figure out.
