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Notes -
As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.
Setting a BIOS password would allow an attacker to install a modified version of the loader that performs decryption (which is not, itself, encrypted, because obviously). The attack would then have to leave the machine, let it be used at least once by the legitimate owner (thus entering the correct password) and then return again to harvest whatever they wanted.
This is a well-studied attack pattern.
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I was going to write about BitLocker, but I doubt people that store BIOS passwords in Excel sheets think about disk encryption much.
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