Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you’ve got an unactivated copy, local account, or don’t know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
They desperately wanted to eliminate personal computers and replace them with dumb terminals running over the net.
When the public rejected this idea
THIS is their response. They are still insisting on total control of our computers.
“do not redeem!” - microsoft, probably
Windows 10 or 11?
🤔 shit… you right
*You’re
You’re boned
MY boned?
Why cant windows copy luks and let you choose your own password
because people will set hunter2 and be done with it.
So?
Meanwhile in Linux with luls, which I’ve had since a pre-pre-pre version somewhere back in the early 2000’s, I can have multiple keys, all works like sunshine, never had problems.
On windows… So we work with highly sensitive data, and ever since I came in I thought it insane that people working remote don’t have that highly sensitive data encrypted. We can’t switch Linux yet, so okay, we go for BitLocker.
Boy oh boy oh boy was that a mistake.
50 remote users, 5 get encrypted devices with BitLocker as a trial and within a month, 3 of them already got locked up permanently because apparently it’ll pwrma lock itself after x amounts of invalid passwords which is just incredibly stupid. But don’t worry, there is a backup key! Yeah, that is lie 48 characters that we’d had to pass by phone and they have to type it flawlessly.
Suffice to say, the remote users will be running Linux soon, like it or not.
Yeah, that is lie 48 characters that we’d had to pass by phone and they have to type it flawlessly.
Wouldn’t be so bad if everyone knew their Alpha Bravo Charlies
My one talent: alpha bravo charlie delta echo foxtrot golf hotel India Juliet kilo Lima mike November Oscar papa Quebec Romeo Sierra tango uniform Victor whiskey x-ray Yankee Zulu, typed using voice to text
hey, at least it tells you if you put in a typo every few chars.
pass by phone
That’s a ticket I would go and overnight mail a pre configured IP KVM
This is gonna happen to a lot more people with their password change.
Why do you have to use there? Nothing a cater. You can’t use Google or open source. I don’t get it. They suck.
Like I need more spyware on my phone.
What about people with landlines? Older people.
So they’re going to lose a huge market share when they force everybody to throw away their computer to run Windows 11.
Holy shit, they automatically activate it on computers without an account to back the key up to?
That’s just malicious
IIRC, they only do this if you’re logged in with a Microsoft account.
Bitlocker is disabled by default if you only use local accounts
I have (had ;'( ) a local account, and bitlocker was activated. I only found out when my motherboard bit the dust, and that triggered the no-TPM bitlocker thingamajig. Goodbye data.
Of course it hits right as I needed the data on that laptop. Fucking murphy and his fancy legal words.
If anyone is in a situation like mine, you might find luck with a little DIY hacking: https://www.techspot.com/news/106166-old-bitlocker-vulnerability-exploited-bypass-encryption-updated-windows.html
I’ve occasionally seen it activate itself on computers with only a local account, though I’ve so far only seen it when upgrading in place to 11 with secure boot enabled in the BIOS, and not every time. Fortunately the one time it locked me out was on a freshly cloned drive, so it only cost me redoing the work.
Also, the number of people who I’ve seen lose all their data because they don’t even know they created an MS account during OOBE, and later had a boot or BIOS hiccup, is too bamn high!
They also do spyware. They just renamed it “AI.”
Did they change it from “telemetry” to AI now?
Unless the “telemetry” has been removed, shouldnt there be “added extra” instead of “renamed”?
Telemetry is exclusively for internal data collection and the inevitable sale of it. Recall is also for data collection but provides a user interface to access a slice of that data under the guise of the whole thing being a “feature”.
Telemetry isnt always collected to be sold. Open source projects often collect crash data to improve the software
Sure, but we’re talking about Microsoft here. When was the last time they actually improved any of their software?
They added windows explorer tabs a couple years ago. Does that count?
I think they renamed everything to copilot
Office365 is now Copilot 365
and also Recall
Can you remind me what that “recall” is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Recall
Basically takes screenshots and stores them, then scans them and makes the text searchable. There’s been a bit of controversy over it lately and how it deals with PII/PHI.
It logs literally everything you do with screenshots, then sends it to M$ despite their assurances that it would be local only.
Super invasive!
Thanks, it was hard to recall
I’m not aware of them uploading the screenshotted data, not for now anyways.
The data is indexed and parsed somehow. The last report on it that I saw had a picture of a semi-famous person be properly indexed under the person’s name, despite it being a picture that was taken by the person talking about recall, which means the image was not public. Whatever recall was doing, it analyzed the picture, and that’s probably not a local process.
It takes a screenshot every five seconds and runs an LLM over it to extract text. Then there’s a UI where you can query it for what you did in the past.
It came under fire when they wanted to introduce it last year, because it stored all that data on your disk in unencrypted form. Meaning if anyone manages to run malicious code on your system, they don’t need to do the collecting themselves anymore, but can rather just send off any screenshotted passwords or whatever other secret things you might’ve been doing on your PC at any point in time. In particular, Microsoft had claimed that the data would be encrypted and it wasn’t. Didn’t even need special permissions to access it.
No idea, if they fixed the encryption now, or if this is just a case of the shitstorm having died down, so they roll it out now. But yeah, even with encryption, the implications aren’t great. If your parents or boss or law enforcement want to know what you were doing on your PC, they now have an exact history. And Microsoft could still change their mind and decide to upload all your data at any point in the future.
Doesn’t that take a ton of CPU/Memory?
Open your mind!
Rectal is what it’s called I believe?
Microsoft Rectal
Not that it helps now, but you can also dump your bitlocker recovery key through powershell and save it independently.
(Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint “C”).KeyProtector
The control panel dialogue allows you to do this as well. Control Panel > system security > Bitlocker encryption. But it also has the superior option which is to turn it off.
I didn’t loose any data BTW. I had my M$ account info, and a backup besides.
But it also has the superior option which is to turn it off.
Why would you not want to encrypt your files? My Linux systems are encrypted too.
Years ago I thought I was being smart encrypting my home dir on my Linux server. I found out the hard way this prevents remote login over ssh using public key encryption, as the .ssh dir is in the home dir, which is encrypted unless you are already logged in at the time! So every time I wanted to ssh in, I had to plug in a monitor and log in on the console first.
Not using Bitlocker is not the same as not encrypting your stuff.
I know, I just meant why would someone willingly disable Bitlocker?
Why would you not want to encrypt your files?
Bitlocker is only as secure as Microsoft is. If someone hacks your account, they’ve got your keys. And Micosoft stores that key in plain text.
It sounds like you’re complaining about both approaches.
If Microsoft doesn’t have the key: You can’t recover your files if you lose it.
If Microsoft does have the key: An attacker could get in and take it (unlikely if you have two factor auth though) and you need to trust Microsoft.
And Micosoft stores that key in plain text.
How do you know this, though? It could be encrypted using your account password as a key or seed.
Disk encryption should absolutely be used, especially on laptops/portable systems.
Otherwise someone steals your laptop and swaps the disk into another system and they’ve got all your stuff. Including that folder that nobody knows about.
Thank you for the word of warning. Does this affect Windows 10 as well?
Does this affect Windows 10 as well
IDK. 10 has bitlocker, so I’d check.
I just checked and it is not on by default.
Holy shit. This happened to me last week.
Turned off Safe Boot when going back over to Win on a dualboot after 6 months. Wanted to avoid updates nuking by dualboot option.
…enter Bitlocker recovery for Every. Single. Logon.
Just need to do one thing that meeds genuine Win11 fingerprint and then I’m doing a 22.1 fresh install.
I thought bitlocker had a maximum of 20 digits for the pin and only numbers were allowed.
Don’t know the pin limit/requirements, but the recovery token is a 48 digit token
Upvote for a acknowledging karma
