I like to surf a Telekom_FON hotspot with my laptop. I use NordVPN whenever I'm connected to Wi-Fi. That's right, or you could still access my computer via local IP or something else. If so how can I turn this off. For info, my laptop has Ubuntu 04/20.
You should be sure of that. 👍
Anyway, your PC can only be accessed if you have shared something.
Otherwise, you could only access data from your web sessions etc. In the WLAN, but this is no longer possible with https either. But with VPN you are on the safe side.
You can also do that with VPN. But that is not a problem either, since a normal desktop system has no open ports, unless you have installed the appropriate software (mostly this software then has its own protection mechanisms).
In such a case, VPN prevents man in the middle attacks in the local network. But since almost all of the traffic is now encrypted anyway, that doesn't really help.
As soon as you connect to the WLAN, your computer can in principle be accessed via the router. Therefore you have to follow the security guidelines for guest or pay attention to public networks.
On Windows computers, you can generally turn off network detection for a public network and deactivate file and printer sharing.
There are certainly comparable solutions for Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with it.
But with VPN you are on the safe side.
The problem with VPN is a false sense of security. If the connection is encrypted correctly anyway, VPN hardly offers any added value. If not, it is still not secure because the traffic still has to come from the VPN server to the target device.
Fortunately, most Linux distributions such as Ubuntu don't do this at all without manually installing and activating the relevant services.
In Windows, network discovery and file and printer sharing are disabled by default for public networks.
But that only works if Windows actually knows that the network is public. If you don't choose that manually, it's not very reliable.
If you activate Wi-Fi you allow a data connection to your laptop. With an evil twin attack, an attacker could pretend to be a trustworthy hotspot through which you would then connect. So everything would run through the hotspot from the attacker.
The VPN prevents the connection from being manipulated or maliciously changed because the connection is encrypted and the VPN checks whether it is really communicating with the desired VPN server. Unauthorized access is blocked.
You can always access all devices in the local network locally, so you should configure a firewall! The VPN is just an additional virtual network interface to which the default route is set, so that the outgoing network traffic runs through the VPN.
If you activate Wi-Fi you allow a data connection to your laptop. With an evil twin attack, an attacker could pretend to be a trustworthy hotspot through which you would then connect. So everything would run through the hotspot from the attacker.
How do you know so much?
I'm a kuketz reader
But you can't easily see which connections are running so unencrypted in the background, so a VPN also secures it.
Neither did I claim otherwise, but the benefits of it are very limited and hardly justify the disadvantages. VPN is especially useful if you use it for the purpose for which it was designed.
Yes, to establish a secure connection, which is what we have here
No, the purpose of VPN is to connect devices to a private network over an insecure connection. I.e. A connection with e.g. The network of a company or an educational institution.
Public VPN providers are misappropriating this technology.
Unless a completely unencrypted WLAN is caught, this is the way it is with public.
That doesn't make a significant difference, because almost everything is encrypted again with SSL / TLS. E.g. If the question above is https: // in the URL, it is therefore always encrypted, whether in the public WLAN or not.
Then that's fine
