Hello there,
I have a question. If I’m doing windows linux dual boot, is there any possibiliy that windows can spy my data on linux? Or: if i got ransomwared on windows, is my linux part of my pc safe or not?
How can I prevent all above?
Thx
Hello there,
I have a question. If I’m doing windows linux dual boot, is there any possibiliy that windows can spy my data on linux? Or: if i got ransomwared on windows, is my linux part of my pc safe or not?
How can I prevent all above?
Thx
Other systems should not be able to see your data on a Linux install as long as the disk is encrypted, which is proposed during the install of many distros.
AFAIU, ransomware will try to lock all devices, USB drives, etc, so no, your Linux install is not safe from that if it is on the same machine. Even machine on the same network might be at risk.
How to prevent ? Backup! Loosing your entire machine data should not be an issue but just a matter of re-installing the OS and recovering your data from a backup. Have at least two backup, including one outside of your house.
About dualbooting though… Putting Windows + anything else on a single drive is a really bad idea and Windows WILL try and take over it, at least breaking the boot partition. More concerning, and it actually happened to me recently: when putting a Linux on one disk and Windows on an other in the same machine, the Windows somehow still managed to break the Linux boot partition…
So if you can afford it and really want to have both OS, you should try and have two machines or at least install Linux on a drive that you can easily unplug.
I hope this will be helpful, good luck!
Like I said elsewhere, the ideal way if you absolutely need to run Winblows on the same machine, is to do so within a VM on the Linux host. Not usually an option if the purpose is gaming, and, well, usually the purpose is gaming.
I had a dualboot on my last laptop for a long time and seems they’ve toned the overwriting of the bootloader way down since the invention of EFI. For the last 8 years or so it occasionally changes the boot order to default to Windows, every time these larger updates come in. But it doesn’t seem to overwrite anything any more.
Other than that, I’d also recommend Backups. Windows doesn’t come with drivers for these filesystems, so it can’t read Linux files. But theoretically things could happen to the data on a harddisk nonetheless.
Y’know, there’s a little part of me that suspects that just because Windoze will not read certain file systems for the user doesn’t mean it doesn’t read those file systems. Especially now that data theft is their business model. I know it’s a little paranoid, but the OS may very well be reading stuff it claims to not recognize. Just food for thought.
I don’t think Microsoft are that clever or malicious in that way. There are third party drivers available and I don’t know what all the Linux parts in Windows these days are able to do… So it’s definitely possible. But I think you’re looking more for a targeted attack with this. Like an agency or a hacker singling you out because they know you have valuable data on that filesystem. But Microsoft’s business model is more fishing for the easy targets and funneling data en masse, not the niche stuff… That might change at some point one day once the Linux subsystem automounts filesystems or something like that.