Hunter Biden and File Vault

[botolo]

You may have heard about the news story related to emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's Macbook by a computer repairman. Trying to keep politics away, what strikes me is the fact that this guy just made a copy of the hard drive content. Is File Vault turned on by default? If not and assuming the Mac is at least protected by a password, is the content of the hard drive still easily available to someone who does not have the password?

According to the computer repairman, this was a 2016 Macbook model with SSD.

https://soundcloud.com/rptrbnd%2Fmac-shop-10-14-cm

 

[casperes1996]

File Vault is not enabled by default. Macs with the T2 chip however does encrypt the data by default, but it is not file vault encryption which means that the encryption can be unlocked without the password; It’s not encryption to prevent access to people who have access to the Mac - it’s just encryption at rest, so if the hard drive was pulled out and manipulated separately, but if you have the entire device and File Vault or a Firmware password hasn’t been enabled by the user, the data is fairly simple to extract.

That said, while it isn’t a default, you’re asked on first boot, during setup, if you want to enable it

 

[Weaselboy]

Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip - Apple Support

Learn which Mac computers have the Apple T2 Security Chip.

support.apple.com

Just to tag on to @casperes1996 excellent explanation, T2 Macs did not come out until 2018, so the 2016 model mentioned in this story would not have the T2 protection.

From the way the story reads, it does not appear FileVault was on. If it was just protected by a login password, that is pretty easy to reset.

 

[D.W.]

We use MacBook Pros where I work, and encrypting the drive has to be done manually. I'm more familiar with encrypting Windows machines, and we use Bitlocker to encrypt the drive, so that if the device is stolen, they aren't able to unlock or copy the drive without the Bitlocker key. Then again, Bitlocker must be turned on manually, and is not on by default. Like everyone else here, I was also drawn to this area of the story.