Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you've got an unactivated copy, local account, or don't know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
It's not permanently locked though.
Apparently it's not configured like that by default and even if it is, just configure it differently if you want a different behaviour Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
Moving over to Linux is a great idea, if you have found a good way to manage them and your users are accepting.
Either way, I have never noticed this issue and we manage hundreds of Windows computers
Nah, not really. I get what you mean, but the feature is obviously intended to lock the drive after a few failed logins because the user's password is generally way less secure than the bitlocker recovery key/encryption key. Brute forcing a 48 digit key is practically impossible while brute forcing a user's password is child's play in comparison.
So in my opinion it sounds like a pretty good idea to include that feature in the security baseline. It's not really Microsoft's fault that you pushed out security baseline settings without checking what they do first. But since you actually did some testing with bitlocker, the impact wasn't that bad. So just adjust or disable the feature and move on.
Exactly. We'll switch to Linux, finally have security and dependable devices, and then we'll move on