On a laptop absolutely. My firewall on my laptop doesn’t let me discriminate between networks so I’m always worried someone will try to attack me on public WiFi for the few ports I want open
On a desktop on a network you trust less important but still no firewall means if another device on your network gets compromised you’re screwed
Yes, except that whether you do is not at all obvious.
Do you use KDE Connect? If yes, you run a network service. Syncthing, a bittorrent client? Those too, and many others. I know this is a Linux community, but as a comparison windows has a bunch of network services running by default.
By saying “network services”, I think menu of us would just think about a web server or a file server, conclude that they don’t run any of those, and don’t bother with it.
When in doubt, sudo netstat -lutpn, and look for the listening ports to see what software listens for informing requests.
On a laptop absolutely. My firewall on my laptop doesn’t let me discriminate between networks so I’m always worried someone will try to attack me on public WiFi for the few ports I want open
On a desktop on a network you trust less important but still no firewall means if another device on your network gets compromised you’re screwed
Keep in mind that a firewall may not be nessasary if you don’t have any network services running.
Yes, except that whether you do is not at all obvious.
Do you use KDE Connect? If yes, you run a network service. Syncthing, a bittorrent client? Those too, and many others. I know this is a Linux community, but as a comparison windows has a bunch of network services running by default.
By saying “network services”, I think menu of us would just think about a web server or a file server, conclude that they don’t run any of those, and don’t bother with it.
When in doubt,
sudo netstat -lutpn
, and look for the listening ports to see what software listens for informing requests.I’d still have one, eventually something is going to slip past a new configuration or dependency that listens.