Linux

As many companies now use Bitlocker encryption, you’ll probably Bitlock your work partition by trying to install the second drive internally. IF YOU MUST boot to another drive, keep it external. And DO NOT unlock or mount your work partition in your personal OS. Really, though, you shouldn’t do this at all.

🙃

How badly do you need your job?

Any thoughts or comments are welcome

If this is a corporate decide your cyber security team have really dropped the ball by enabling you to change the boot order.

Damn my laptop has secure boot and extra on top , I believe the usb ports are physically disabled.

I assume everything is watched on what I'm doing. Can't remember the wording but i can't do shit without getting in a heap of trouble.

Browser add-ons are like a 2 week process to get approved

In most cases, work laptops have software(s) installed to automatically keep track of these activities, and flag it to security team of your organization. At that point, it will either lead to a formal warning to you, or termination/forced resignation.

From organization point of view, this is to avoid any accidental (or intentional) leak of confidential data, and/or accidentally (or intentionally) infecting your (work) system with malware/ransomware.

The latter had happened in one of my previous organizations, and the person responsible was terminated from job immediately.

You can buy a used ThinkPad T480 for like $75 on ebay. A lot cheaper than having to explain your shenanigans to Maude from HR.

I knew someone who did this but swapped out the physical hard drive each time. I wouldn't dual boot because then it's much more obvious to IT what you've done.

This is only realistically feasible though if the hard drive is easily accessible. If it's something like a Mac or soldered in dual booting is your only choice. As others have said, this could get you in a lot of trouble with your company. Check the docs you've signed

I work in IT and that's what I do lol

IDK about other places, but the document we make our users sign make it clear that modifying the internal hardware is a fireable offense.

The laptop isn’t yours, use a personal device for personal stuff, and work device for work only.

I think this is a good idea. You may want to use a different MAC on Linux, true.

Also only use the personal drive at home if you fear being spied on.

The chance that your company embeds spyware in the BIOS is like 0%. If you can press F12, Windows is off and you will not be spied on.

Otherwise make sure to do real reboots and use this shutdown command to really turn off windows, as otherwise it hibernates only.

For anyone wondering about the security issues caused by this, even if the windows partition is encrypted, it's still possible to get secrets from the Windows install.

If you have root access to a Linux machine, you can easily replace the Windows kernel loader with one that looks just like Windows, but does nothing other than steal your encryption password on login/boot.

Secure Boot/TPM would protect against this, but Linux users (especially those that are more lax about security) tend to disable it as part of installing Linux.

Looking at the replies I'm happy I line in Germany where none of this is legal without signing a document that explains in detail how exactly you are surveiled.

apparently you are unaware of how much monitoring goes on in corporate IT. you're lucky they haven't already found the mac address yet booted with a different os, or maybe they're already onto you.
I would stop doing what you're doing immediately and hope it's not too late

This is just a bad idea in general.