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.

  • krash@lemmy.ml
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    14 hours ago

    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…

    • fatalicus@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      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.