Microsoft has called threats to its BitLocker disk encryption tech “relatively low risk,” noting that repeated physical access to the targeted machine is required in order to complete any attack.

“The company’s move was prompted by a paper published by five German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (Fraunhofer SIT), a Darmstadt, Germany-based security company,” writes Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer.

“The Fraunhofer SIT researchers spelled out five attack possibilities, including one where the attacker boots the PC from a flash drive and replaces the BitLocker bootloader with a substitute bootloader that spoofs the PIN request process, then snatches the PIN and saves it to disk or sends it elsewhere using the computer's wireless connection,” Keizer writes.

Click here to read the Computerworld article.