Why Bitlocker Is More About M$ Privacy Marketing Than Practical Security

Microsoft is pushing Bitlocker on Windows 11. Now if you are managing enterprise laptops with highly sensitive data stored locally, that's not the scenario I'm talking about. For most average Windows users, Bitlocker probably seems like a wise thing to do without doing a deep dive into things like performance hit, recovery triggered on major Windows updates, storage of master key with Microsoft, loss of key, etc etc. Take a step back and consider most of these users are syncing their files to cloud storage (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) and all those files encrypted by Bitlocker are unencrypted before they are copied to Cloud Storage. In my opinion it is all more about Microsoft chasing after Apple's privacy and security reputation. Sort of defeats the main benefit of Bitlocker because, in reality…

Cloud account compromise is COMMON

It can happen through:

• Phishing
• Password reuse
• Weak passwords
• Token/session theft
• Social engineering
• Malware
• SIM swaps (for SMS 2FA users)
• OAuth token grants from malicious apps
• Credential stuffing

Billions of consumer accounts are compromised this way every year.

Cloud accounts = huge, high-value targets with millions of users.
Attackers don’t need physical hardware.
They don’t need to be skilled.
It scales.

Attack vector probability: VERY HIGH

Laptop theft + skilled attacker is RARE

A normal laptop thief:

• Wants to sell the laptop
• Does not remove the SSD
• Does not image file systems
• Does not know what a vault file is
• Does not know what OAuth tokens are
• Does not have GPU cracking setups
• Does not know how to bypass Windows lockdown

Attack vector probability: VERY LOW

 BitLocker is very good at:

• protecting against someone physically removing the drive
• preventing forensic SSD analysis
• keeping Windows login bypass from revealing files

But it does nothing for the far more likely scenario:

• cloud credential compromise
• phishing
• session token theft
• browser extension compromise
• password reuse/hijack
• malware on the system
• remote takeover
• OAuth hijack