When you need to drop off your tech devices for a repair, how confident are you that they won’t be snooped on?
CBC’s Marketplace took smartphones and laptops to repair stores across Ontario — including large chains Best Buy and Mobile Klinik — and found that in more than half of the documented cases, technicians accessed intimate photos and private information not relevant to the repair.
Marketplace dropped off devices at 20 stores, ranging from small independent shops to medium-sized chains to larger national chains, after installing monitoring software on the devices. In total, 16 stores were recorded. (At four stores, the tracking software didn’t log anything, or the stores didn’t appear to turn the devices on.)
Technicians at nine stores accessed private data, including one technician who not only viewed photos but copied them onto a USB key.
Shitty people will do shitty things. That said, if you don’t give your password, be prepared to have the technician test all sorts of stuff in front of you. The selfie camera, ear speaker, microphone, etc. sometimes are mounted on the screen. If there are problems, the tech will need to redo the repair. Not advocating for giving your pw, but be prepared for the process to be less convenient.
Edit: My bad, should have clarified I’m talking about phones exclusively. If you’re worried about your computer, create a non-admin user and give them that password. If they had the skills to bypass that, they wouldn’t be working at a repair shop.
What are you talking about? I worked at a geek squad back in college days and no one there needed your admin password to get into your computer. We’d just remove the password. The only reason we asked for your password was so you’d get your computer back with the password still on it, lol…
I’m more shocked that none of the techs found the monitoring software and assumed it was something malicious and disabled or removed it…
Bitlocker? FileVault? If you’re cracking those, why the fuck are you working at a Best Buy?
Bitlocker or Filevault for the pin/password to get onto your computer? I don’t think that’ll be a common scenario. I also imagine they bypass the whole password thing, rather than cracking the actual password.
Yup. A majority of the time people didn’t have any of that setup anyway. But also most of windows security is centered around external attacks over a network, not someone actually having your computer so there are lots of ways to just remove the password if you can plug in a flash drive or insert a CD.
If someone actually security conscious brought in a computer truly locked down, we would have had a tough time of it, but people that know how to do that aren’t bringing their computer to geek squad to be fixed, so it’s a catch 22.
Yeah I had a buddy who bought a PC that had a BIOS password on it(which now I realize was probably stolen… but it was like a big box store 2010 desktop which is weird to steal) I was surprised with how easy it was to bypass that, and gain access with a flash drive and 3 minutes of googling
Why? Couldn’t he just use a live distro?
Phones. Also technicians aren’t that amazing most of the time, if you drop off your thing at the place you bought it they might know the procedure to change a screen but that’s it.
Also, even on laptops/desktops this might not always be possible depending on the bios configuration. Corporate devices for example might have the bios and booting from untrusted media locked down.
Corporate devices shouldn’t be going to Best Buy.
Yeah, absolutely not.
One user got his work iPhone replaced in the apple Store by himself and never told us. Obviously no work apps or anything got installed properly.
And the work phones aren’t even ours, they are leased 🤦 That was a pain in the ass.
Ah yeah I suppose that’s true