Wow, it's pretty wild they didn't even attempt to encrypt or protect this data, even if it is local to your machine. What a treasure trove for malware to sift through.
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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It IS encrypted. Not well, but it's encrypted.
I thought that it was encrypted if your home directory was encrypted? The impression that I got was that it was just a SQLite database stored in the clear. The user must certainly be able to make queries of that database in order for it to work, so even if it's hosted by a non-user service, malware running locally will still be able to exfiltrate the data.
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Please go through the FAQ section of the git project. It's an eye-opener.
Q. Does this enable mass data breaches of website?
A. Yes. The next time you see a major data breach where customer data is clearly visible in the breach, you’re going to presume company who processes the data are at fault, right? But if people have used a Windows device with Recall to access the service/app/whatever, hackers can see everything and assemble data dumps without the company who runs the service even being aware. The data is already consistently structured in the Recall database for attackers. So prepare for AI powered super breaches. Currently credential marketplaces exist where you can buy stolen passwords — soon, you will be able to buy stolen customer data from insurance companies etc as the entire code to do this has been preinstalled and enabled on Windows by Microsoft.
It's worst than that (as bad as this is)...
Today getting some data on a user is bad as smart hackers can put together the context ... However any guessing the hacker has to do may alert the user before the hacked data can successfully be exploited
Now, a hacker would know exactly where each password goes and worse, they'd could learn the entire workflow of internal systems to successfully imitate a trained user...
This means the hacker could use the stolen bank data and legitimately issue credit cards to anyone they want (for example)
It's no longer "we'll expose some data", now it's "we can use this data to infiltrate your systems and wreak havoc in whatever way we want"
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For the kids
Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal
Morons:
Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files invisible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.
That’s wild. I’m surprised I never heard of this. Straight up malware.
In a just society the Sony execs would have been jailed for CFAA violations.
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Hilarious to me that it OCRs the text. The text is generated by the computer. It's almost like when Lt. Cmdr. Data wants to get information from the computer database, so he tells the computer to display it and just keeps increasing the speed
there are way more efficient means of getting information from A to B than displaying it, imaging it, and running it though image processing!
I totally get that this is what makes sense, and it's independent of the method/library used for generating text, but still...the computer "knows" what it's displaying (except for images of text), and yet it has to screenshot and read it back.
It happens the same on android for some reason
Like 5-8 years ago the google assistant app was able to select and copy text from any app when invoked, I think it was called “now on tap”. Then because they’re google and they’re contractually obligated to remove features after some time, they removed this from the google app and integrated it in the pixel app switcher (and who cares if 99% of android users aren’t using a pixel, they say). The new implementation sucks, as it does ocr instead of just accessing the raw text…
It only works fine with us English and not with other languages. But maybe it’s ok as it seems that google’s development style is us-centric
Now on Tap also used OCR. Both Google Lens and Now on Tap get the same bullshit results on any languages that are not Latin. Literally, Ж gets read as >|< by both exactly the same.
They changed it, in the beginning it was using the text and not ocr
For example this app could be set as assistant and get the raw text https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weberdo.apps.copy
But only the app set on system as assistant can do it
I was very disappointed when they changed it around 2018 as it produced garbage in my language when it was working so good…
Hey, yeah… why aren’t they just tapping the font rendering DLL?
…are they tapping the front rendering dll??
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Having worked on a product that actually did this, it's not as easy as it seems. There are many ways of drawing text on the screen.
GDI is the most common, which is part of the windows API. But some applications do their own rendering (including browsers).
Another difficulty, even if you could tap into every draw call, you would also need a way to determine what is visible on the screen and what is covered by something else.
That's the thing, it doesn't really know what it's displaying. I can send a bunch of textboxes, but if they're hidden, or drawn off-screen, or underneath another element, then they're not actually displayed.
Text from OCR is one kind of match. Recall also runs visual comparisons with the image tokens stored.
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Wait so the malware won't even need a rootkit first? Damn this is worse than I thought...
the screenshots and text are just sitting in the appdata folder, which requires no special permission to access
Nice 😂 having extra pw manager n stuff in secret encrypted file only temporary handle decrypted PWs in RAM etc. But then, if you accidentally click on the eye, boom screenShot PW saved as pic of clear Text, nice. Also all personal eBanking stuff etc. And of Course, if you stream Netflix, tons of copyright protected material, lol.
And of Course, if you stream Netflix, tons of copyright protected material, lol.
Nope, DRM protected content like Netflix is one of the few things it doesn't capture, it's even mentioned in Recall's privacy section. I'll admit that that's likely due to technical reasons with how the video stream is decrypted and decoded on the GPU and is never actually accessible to the user, not necessarily because they wouldn't want to save that as well.
Malware won't even need to wait for the user to access something sensitive, they can just go back through the user's Recall history and get the data for immediate exfiltration. No chance for anti-malware software to update and catch it before it does anything truly bad, it will just always be too late if given even a minute.
Imagine how easy is the life of law enforcement now.
Before if they seized a laptop encrypted with bit locker they could not do anything.
Now they just need to ask Microsoft the encryption password, which is automatically and silently saved in the Microsoft account (now mandatory) and they can have all the history of what the subject of the investigation did in the past years
What? Bitlocker key tied to MS account and mandatory? What's the point of encryption if the key isn't secret any more?
To protect against casual theft of a device causing the data to be in the thief's hands in addition to the actual device.
The average person unfortunately is not likely to properly backup their encryption keys so if they forget their password (or don't use one and rely on the default of just TPM), they'll complain about losing their data. Having the key backed up gives them a way to get their data back in non-theft situations.
I like how people on lemmy seem to only think of the high stakes state sponsored theft. And not the theft that’s thousands of times more common.
Yeah. Most theft targets the hardware, not the data within.
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It’s secret to most, not all.
In a hilarious and infuriating side note, MS is obviously doing their absolute best to blame-shift here.
It’s code. It’s a project someone made to graphically illustrate and demonstrate, in the wild, why the entire concept of MS Recall is an absolutely awful, foundationally-flawed idea. It is not a “hacker tool”. The MS c-suite and board members are just pissed that stock go down as a result of their stupidity, and they’re looking for people to blame who aren’t themselves.
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How could the db be all plaintext unencrypted?!? I mean this is amateur hour at display here
How are they supposed to feed it into their LLMs later if it's encrypted??
Decrypt it server side like all other encrypted data
If we believe it doesn’t leave the machine then the ai can have a decryption layer
So . . . MS wants to force Recall on us.. Assures us that it's "secure." And it can't be bothered to even lightly encrypt the data? This is just plain incompetent.
Also, MS want to bundle CoPilot with Office 365, a subscription service. You will be paying for the privilege of spying on yourself.
What an unexpected turn of events.
Imagine if they zero day this.
Lol "if". This thing is going to be a massive target.
Someone has already demonstrated using an off-the-shelf infostealer to steal the Recall database from a test computer. It won't take any special skills or technology for this to be a problem.
I was gonna make a joke on how there's no root on windows, but then I remembered sudo for windows is now a thing so.......
sudon't please --pretty
Windows be like
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