Hey folks! I recently sent my laptop in for repairs, and it had Windows 11 Home installed with Bitlocker encryption protecting my data. Since they needed access to the device for repairs, I went ahead and reinstalled Windows and set up a local account. I thought this was a safe move, but now I'm hearing about these Bitpixie attacks that can potentially bypass Bitlocker encryption. Should I be worried about my data security, or am I overreacting?
3 Answers
Bitlocker does its best work when your PC is shut down to prevent theft of data via direct drive access. The Bitpixie attack does require physical access to your PC, so unless someone had that during the repair, you're likely safe. Just make sure to check that your Bitlocker recovery key is safely stored, either printed out or in your Microsoft account, as I've seen issues where it doesn’t save correctly.
Reinstalling Windows can take time, and it's usually not a priority for repair shops to decrypt Bitlocker volumes since it’s labor-intensive. They probably just wanted to get your laptop back to you quickly. As long as you’ve secured your recovery key and there was no suspicious activity done to your laptop while in repair, you should be all good!
I think you might be overthinking it a bit! If you formatted and reinstalled Windows, you probably wiped any sensitive data you were worried about. Also, Windows 11 Home does have a version of Bitlocker called 'device encryption,' which is similar but not exactly the same as Bitlocker. So unless the repair shop had access to your data prior to the reinstall, you should be fine.
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