Writeup from 2022 that I assume is mostly still valid. TLDR:
- Mainstream Linux is less secure than macOS, Windows, and ChromeOS. (Elsewhere: “[iOS/Android] were designed with security as a foundational component. They were built with sandboxing, verified boot, modern exploit mitigations and more from the start. As such, they are far more locked down than other platforms and significantly more resistant to attacks.”)
- Move as much activity outside the core maximum privilege OS as possible.
- OP doesn’t mention immutable OS, but I assume they help a lot.
- Create a threat model and use it to guide your time and money investments in secure computing.
Once you have hardened the system as much as you can, you should follow good privacy and security practices:
- Disable or remove things you don’t need to minimise attack surface.
- Stay updated. Configure a cron job or init script to update your system daily.
- Don’t leak any information about you or your system, no matter how minor it may seem.
- Follow general security and privacy advice.
Last time I tried Ubuntu, it had a firewall but it wasn’t active by default. Unless something changed in the last few years.
No firewall means your system is going to get scanned to see if anything is open or exploitable
Yes. And what would be open, much less exploitable, on a default install of a major distro at all, much less on the timeframe on which one would normally be on public wifi?
People hang out on public WiFi sometimes with packet sniffing and other tools to exploit people. Especially some distros don’t have X server remote display locked down.
If you want to know what is open or exploitable CVE you can run a script that discovers all CVE exploits against a machine
The assertion was literally “Mainstream Linux is less secure than macOS…”
Packet sniffers have nothing to do with OS or firewall, so I don’t know what packet sniffers have to do with this. Can you name an arguably “mainstream” distro where it is the case that X is open by default?
Are you aware of an IRL exploitable CVE for even marginally up to date-ish Ubuntu or Fedora without user installed non-default services, exploitable by cold hitting a random port like a windows 98 worm? Maybe I’m just massively misinformed, but I don’t believe such a thing has existed since the Debian bad randoms meltdown of the 2000’s, but even that would require sshd running, which afaik Fedora and Ubuntu don’t have on a default install unless the user turns it on, so despite the Starbucks wifi happening to have a 1337 h4x0r utilizing perfect AI capable of finding all CVEs and chaining them he isn’t getting in on a closed port on ANY modern unix.