Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.

Technology@lemmy.world – 1009 points – 6 months ago

Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?

A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.

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This is a feature hundreds of millions of people will use and very likely won't cause any security issues. These doomsday scenarios every Linux user here is predicting is a bit much, don't you think so?

We've seen it before, it's not idle speculation. Windows machines have been the hosts of the largest botnets in the world. Whenever a company does something stupid like this it invariably gets into the wrong hands. It's not even a question of if it will happen just when it will happen.

Oh and it's not "Linux users" saying it, it's everybody with an ounce of technical common sense. We're all here shouting at Microsoft "it's a bad idea" and they won't care and it will go exactly as badly as predicted.

Oh and it’s not “Linux users” saying it, it’s everybody with an ounce of technical common sense.

Which kinda correlate with each other. Which allows for a certain bad faith argument to be made.

Yes, we have seen it many times before. Much ado about nothing. New feature that will mean some new security measures. Everybody will move on and in a year nobody will remember how some people in the Linux community were panicking.

I will never find out exactly when your bank data is stolen because of this, so I'm just going to laugh about it now.

Go ahead laugh. Because you will indeed forget all about it and never remember your doubts and panic laughter as nothing will happen.

Oh it WILL cause security issues. It's just a tradeoff against if they are worth the benefits.

There likely won't be anything major while 1. 4 billion people will benefit. Security measures will be adapted for this new feature.

This same thing happened before, a lot of panic for nothing.

Define "new security measures"

I don't know. We will both be able to discover them when the features are deployed.

This is a senseless hysteria about how this is horrible and... I don't even want to go into all the dumb shit I read.

Did you read the article?

This system basically do a character recognition on EVERYTHING the user is displaying and save the results in a very small file not that well protected.

The data is very small (I guess because it's basically text?), seems easy to find. That means the history of all you did on your computer (apparently only for the last three feays by default,but well...) can be stolen at once, in a minuscule file.

I'm not an IT specialist, but I don't see in which world this can remotely be a good idea...

As I understand not everything will be read and stored, storage will be encrypted. We don't even know what exactly will be stored and everybody here is losing their mind.

We already have a lot of sensitive information on our computers and nobody is panicking.

I guess it's hard to get used to new stuff. Or maybe Linux users are afraid that their favourite system won't be able to compete anymore.

Based on what Microsoft themselves said we know: everything will be stored (except edge private session...). They specifically say they don't do content moderation: they log everything.

Did you read the article?

Q. Cool, so hackers and malware can’t access it, right?

A. No, they can.

Q. But it’s encrypted.

A. When you’re logged into a PC and run software, things are decrypted for you. Encryption at rest only helps if somebody comes to your house and physically steals your laptop — that isn’t what criminal hackers do.

As a windows user I'm not delighted by this.

Edit: at this point you must be trolling...

If you are so afraid, you can just turn it of. You are aware of this are you not?

OK if you think I'm trolling, why did you answer?

I give you the benefit of the doubt you are a reasonable person who can go beyond their emotions of a feature of an os. And the emotions this article stirred.

You didn't read the article.

We do know the answers to these questions. And if I can use a 2 line script to exfiltrate all your screen data for days/weeks in under a few MB of data.

So better hope you, never, ever, ever run unauthorized or malicious code, because now it basically has a honeypot of top priority data, always stored in a known location and compressed for easy uploads.

What kind of malicious code would be able to do that?

Q. The data is processed entirely locally on your laptop, right?

A. Yes! They made some smart decisions here, there’s a whole subsystem of Azure AI etc code that process on the edge.

Q. Cool, so hackers and malware can’t access it, right?

A. No, they can.

Q. But it’s encrypted.

A. When you’re logged into a PC and run software, things are decrypted for you. Encryption at rest only helps if somebody comes to your house and physically steals your laptop — that isn’t what criminal hackers do.

For example, InfoStealer trojans, which automatically steal usernames and passwords, are a major problem for well over a decade — now these can just be easily modified to support Recall.

Q. But the BBC said data cannot be accessed remotely by hackers.

A. They were quoting Microsoft, but this is wrong. Data can be accessed remotely.

Q. Microsoft say only that user can access the data.

A. This isn’t true, I can demonstrate another user account on the same device accessing the database.

Q. So how does it work?

A. Every few seconds, screenshots are taken. These are automatically OCR’d by Azure AI, running on your device, and written into an SQLite database in the user’s folder.

This database file has a record of everything you’ve ever viewed on your PC in plain text. OCR is a process of looking an image, and extracting the letters.

Q. What does the database look like?

A:https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1796218726808748367?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1796218726808748367%7Ctwgr%5E2eccf634534245a77c4f931d8722f1b8c6f23595%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fx.com%2FGossiTheDog%2Fstatus%2F1796218726808748367image%3D

Q. How do you obtain the database files?

A. They’re just files in AppData, in the new CoreAIPlatform folder.

Q. But it’s highly encrypted and nobody can access them, right?!

A. Here’s a few second video of two Microsoft engineers accessing the folder: https://cyberplace.social/system/media_attachments/files/112/535/509/719/447/038/original/7352074f678f6dec.mp4

Q. …But, normal users don’t run as admins!

A. According to Microsoft’s own website, in their Recall rollout page, they do: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*WGE1jcRzhe6WAGQS

In fact, you don’t even need to be an admin to read the database — more on that in a later blog.

Q. But a UAC prompt appeared in that video, that’s a security boundary.

A. According to Microsoft’s own website (and MSRC), UAC is not a security boundary: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*TTjYNH15IoP_d8JhhG3cEA.png

Q. So… where is the security here?

A. They have tried to do a bunch of things but none of it actually works properly in the real world due to gaps you can drive a plane through.

Q. Does it automatically not screenshot and OCR things like financial information?

A. No: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*OZMjujpALL3IfAQYT64x7Q.png

Do I have to continue or do you think you could actually read the article for the rest? It's clearly a bigger deal than "linux users mad because windows better" and your poor excuse for a troll just makes it look like you're too stupid to read the article laid out in front of you. Well, now you have no excuse so get good.

Sorry I don't take everyones word as truth. This guy is just one guy. One guy against the whole Microsoft corporation whose entire fortune depends on this not to fail in the way he said it certainly will. Absurd.

Lol you're hopeless.

Lol you believe everything lol.

Have fun with that.

I will, together with 1.4 billion people who will do the same.

Oooooh scary.

I'm not surprised you are scared, considering what puts you into panic.

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Then don't believe one guy, read the other reports on the feature, or the reports from Microsoft's BUILD conference that confirm these details.

It's stored in the appdata folder in plaintext.

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Encryption at rest is meaningless if you get infected with spyware.

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very likely won't cause any security issues.

Hahahahaha. Oh wait, you're serious? Let me laugh even harder. HAHAHA

You are the clown with a sign: the end is nigh. You are being naive.

You're being exceptionally - and genuinely stupidly - naiive.

Sure. Why not. These hysterical people here panicking are the chosen ones that know and understand everything.

Are you braindead? Yes yes taking regular screenshots of the desktop can't possibly be a security risk, right?

You can define almost anything as a security risk. But we aren't children to play such stupid games.

We are talking about someone gaining that information and the probability of that happening without even knowing what security mesaures will be in place. I think the risk is negligible even today with the limited information about it that we have now. Other People here, presumably you as well are hysterical about it.

Thats what the discussion is. You actually believe Microsoft will launch this and then everybody will be hacked or something. I think that is... not smart.

No, I don't think "everyone will get hacked or something", don't put words in my. I mouth for the sake of your argument.

What it is, and this is undeniable, is a massive fucking privacy and security hole if someone gains control of your computer.

I didn't want to put words in your mouth, but wanted to clear up where each of us stand so there is no missunderstanding.

If somebody gains control of your computer today, that's a massive privacy and security hole in itself.

If you didn't want to put words in someone's mouth then you shouldn't have said something like

You actually believe Microsoft will launch this and then everybody will be hacked or something.

Oh a knight in shining armour trying to defend my dialogue partner?

Did you ask anyone needed defense? Because I'm pretty sure they don't.

If you read carefully I wrote "or something" at the end implying that I don't know exactly what they believe. It was not that subtle of invitation for them to agree with my first assessment or correct me. I will try to be really blunt in the future, so that you don't missunderstand again.

? I'm not defending anyone, I'm calling out bullshit when I see it

I don't really care that you like watching kids through their bedroom windows or whatever

If that doesn't accurately describe your views, no worries—I said "or whatever," so it's fine

What a dumb and petty response.

Bye.

Absolutely, but even with control of your computer, if you're smart, other accounts etc will still be inaccessible by the attacker.

Not when they get access to the Windows built in desktop spy saving everything it sees.

Not if it's encrypted and if sensitive information is not saved.

Main point is still that gaining control of someone's computer against their will is practically impossible today. If someone manages to do it, they already have your files and all the sensitive information they could want. They won't even bother with this recall. And if you are worried about it, you will be able to just turn it off.

Much ado about nothing.

"If sensitive information is not saved" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you there. The issue is that it saves everything.

But it doesn't save completely everything. It does snapshots as far as I understand. So it's unlikely a whole password would be there on a snapshot. And again, it had to be mentioned that anything can be excluded from recall or disabled completely.

At this point it has to be again highlighted that gaining access to a computer is very hard and that in itself is game over scenario. More information can be gained from a keylogger than this recall feature.

Eric Parkers video Recall

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Eric Parkers video Recall

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

A keylogger isn't retroactive to before the keylogger was installed though. Recall is. Also, with Recall you don't need to write keylogging software and get it past antimalware scans (and keep it from getting detected), you just have to get an infostealer past them one single time to take the Recall database.

It's very unlikely you could get the password from recall

The video posted by Moorshou literally shows someone getting a password and a credit card number from it. Yes, the password was due to someone clicking the show password button momentarily but do we just never expect people to use those or to not use a password manager that would show the password on screen at some point? Due to it doing text recognition, you would literally be able to just search for "credit card" to find all the times when it was displaying a credit card field on a checkout page or "password" to find all the times someone is logging in or using their password manager. And that's using the built in search, not even exfiltrating the data and processing it with more specialized tools.

You really need to watch that video to see what it can do and how easily it can do it.

So even if it does ship like this guy thinks it will, it will take someone gaining control of the computer and having the victim click show password at the wrong time.

The end is nigh.

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????? It saves everything it sees that's the point ?????

Not the same as a snapshot.

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