this rootless Python script rips Windows Recall’s screenshots and SQLite database of OCRed text and allows you to search them.
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.
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.
All true, which is what I meant by “not well” encrypted. It’s technically encrypted, but for all practical purposes it might as well not be.
Is it? I skimmed the GitHub source code and couldn’t see anything involving encryption, but it’s totally possible I missed something. Perhaps just accessing the database from python is enough to decrypt it.
Now ransomware hackers can sell all your shit to someone else if you refuse to pay.
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”
I doubt that. It’s preinstalled and enabled for personal users.
Even if it is enabled by default on pro/enterprise, there will probably be a group policy to disable it.
It feels like this was intended for buisnesses to monitor for phrases on your screen like “coolmath games unblocked free”
or to extract and upload a summary of what happened every second of every day to the server defined in the group policy.
At the same time, I think I would actually use this tool if it were available on a corporate machine.
I already assume my employer is recording everything I do. So, I have zero expectation of privacy.
I regularly have like 30 different tabs and text documents open that meant something to me a couple days ago, but I’ve since lost the context. Being able to ask my computer “why was this important?” or “how did I find this?” would be super useful.
I doubt it. There are plenty of tools that already do this if that was what they wanted, they’d just model it after those. Storing it locally isn’t how such tools usually work, they get shipped off to a remote server for ingestion.
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.
Very specific, but makes sense
OBJ to you too, friend 🙇♀️
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??
My guess is that they looked at their screen reader API, saw that it wasnt 100% of the text on screen and said fuck it! Were using OCR!
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.
To be fair, Data was designed to be like a human, and was made in the image of his creator. He has a number of design decisions that are essentially down to his creator wanting to create something like a human. Including that which you describe.
Data was never intended to work like a PC, it’s very normal that he can’t just wirelessly interface with stuff.
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
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.
MS is obviously doing their absolute best to blame-shift here
There is not a single word in that article that says anything about blame shifting. That title was written by wired.com
Where is the blame shifting? The article says they made no comment and the only MS quotes are just random pr feature blurbs
Dude the headline:
this hacker tool
It’s absolutely not a “hacker tool”. It’s a proof of concept. It’s just code. The author and/or editor is leaning on ingrained negative kneejerk reactions from less knowledgeable members of the general public towards the term “hacker”.
So that’s not Microsoft, that’s Wired doing that. Also it IS a hacker tool. It’s a tool to automate the scraping of data and sending it somewhere.
He’s a white hat hacker, releasing the tool to raise awareness. If he was a black hat hacker he’d be holding onto it and praying Microsoft goes through with release so he could use it to compromise systems.
I don’t see any blame shifting at all
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
That takes up precious cpu cycles
So does the rest of it
If only Microsoft required a second prossesor like some sort of module just for encrypting and decrypting things without using additional CPU cycles… What if we also stored the encryption keys on that module so we could trust that platform…
Honestly I’m pissed that even if I switch OS I’m probably going to be paying more for CPUs from now on to account for microsofts blatant abuse of a monopoly.
How old of a system are you running because TPM have been included on CPUs since at least 2009. Microsoft requiring something already built into modern CPU isn’t the reason why CPUs cost more now.
First off. Windows 11 requires TPM2.0 introduced in 2014. Second, the first consumer cpu to include ftpm wasn’t until 2015.
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.
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
good luck to people typing their passwords in visible mode
Windows, pretending it can’t read what you’re typing in because you didn’t click “show password”:
That was quick.
