If that’s a significant concern-maybe you’re planning to sell the device to a stranger on eBay-go ahead and remove the hard drive, says Richard Fisco, who oversees electronics testing for Consumer Reports.Īfter all, a hacker can’t break into a hard drive that’s not there. While a factory reset is generally sufficient, a determined hacker could, at least theoretically, use advanced data recovery software to retrieve your old files. Reinstalling your system before sale is a much safer alternative.” “Or you can miss deleting some important files altogether. But keep in mind by creating a Security Baseline, by default all settings in the baseline are enabled.“You’re likely to forget things like passwords saved in browsers and personal data in the deleted items folder,” says Matt Ham, owner of the service company Computer Repair Doctor. The setup is pretty simple, as it is just creating the MDM Security Baseline and assign it to your devices. If the device is not encrypted with BitLocker, the device is not wiped and not locked, it reboots and the user can try to sign-in again. If the user is able to retrieve the recovery key, the user can gain access again to the device.Īs the Windows device is locked in BitLocker recovery mode, a prerequisite of this setup is the device is encrypted with BitLocker. This is actually not completely true as the behavior is that the device is rebooted after a number of authentication failures and not wiped, but locked in the BitLocker recovery wizard. A value of 0 disables device wipe functionality.

The description of the setting states The number of authentication failures allowed before the device will be wiped. The setting is found in the Device Lock section of the Security Baseline and called Number of sign-in failures before wiping device. Since the release of the MDM Security Baseline in Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune) a comparable setting is available for Windows 10 devices. Wiping a mobile device, with Android or iOS as OS, after a number of sign-in failures is a commonly used Intune setting to protect the device and corporate data against unauthorized acces.

Wipe windows 10