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.

  • bluesheep@lemm.ee
    1·
    10 hours ago

    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.