Question: So, let’s say you have a notebook, and you encrypt the entire hard drive. Whenever you boot it’s gonna ask for a password, meaning nobody can access your data without the password. On the other hand, what if your notebook got stolen whilst it was in sleep mode? Is there any protection that the encryption can offer?
Thanks
Answer: Once you’re booted up the encryption key stays in memory. If they really wanted they could directly attach to the motherboard and extract the encryption key from memory. If you’ve encrypted your hard drive I would certainly hope you set your laptop up to require a password to log back in. If you have (and it’s secure) then they can’t run a program to steal the key. At that point they have two options, try to physically force the key out (through the motherboard) or reboot and hope it wasn’t encrypted.
If you have hard drive encryption enabled and you DON’T have a password for your account (or it doesn’t ask when waking up) or your password is weak and easily guessable, hard drive encryption won’t help you much.