this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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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.

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

That assumes they know which Microsoft account it was attached to, the password, and have another device to access that account and retrieve the recovery key. If they did the setup five years ago, they've probably forgotten all that info.