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I found this article to be of some help: http://www.andrewault.net/2010/05/17/securing-an-ubuntu-serv...

To start, you will just need to set up IPTables and Fail2Ban.

That sort of stuff is really only necessary if on your home network you're doing port passthroughs or if this machine is directly connected to the internet with a public IP. For most users behind a router, you don't really need fail2ban and iptables.

Caveat: I haven't read the article linked in the GP, yet. (I will.) But the comments here immediately elicit this thought:

How many users have a laptop that they are connecting to one or another undefined (to them) form of "public" wifi? (And/or to someone else's internal network that may be compromised.)

Even then, out of the box, the only services listening to ports are dhcp and mdns.

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