Case description:

A customer seek for our company advice regards to his external HDD that encrypted by bitlocker. This HDD is a personal belonging that always connected to company laptop. He is using it normally until a system update ran by his company. After the laptop updated, the HDD will prompt and request for 48-digit bitlocker code whenever he try to access his HDD. Firstly, he seeks for help from company’s IT department, but failed. He left his drive in our centre for assessment.

Action (Solution):

Our data recovery specialist took a week to analyze the encrypted data. We clone an image from the HDD and varies attempt was done on image instead of original drive. During the second week, we keep liaise with customer to get some necessary info for drive decryption.

The Outcome

During the second week, we keep liaise with customer to get some necessary info for drive decryption. Even though it is not a smooth process, we successfully recover some data from the encrypted data. Unfortunately, the folder structure still unable to decrypt. All files were saved based on the file type. He is satisfied which this one outcome of the recovery, mentioned that at some important files was saved.

Suggestion

If possible, try not to connect personal HDD or SSD into company PC. You will never know which PC is having Self-Encrypting. This encryption process is transparent and most of the user only realize it when it is too late. This process will be done automatically and continuously without any user interaction. It does not have any key or code recorded by company’s IT department.

Ever Higher Data Recovery Centre, we left no data behind.