This is very important. The rich virus ecosystem that developed in windows did so because all windows installs are essentially the same.
Attacks on your NIC in not something I'd lose sleep over simply because there are so darn many nics. I have enough trouble simply getting the authorized drivers to run on a dozen nics of the same model number consistently. How much harder would it be to get an exploit to run over the wire on all but the tiniest fraction of installed nics.
This is very important. The rich virus ecosystem that developed in windows did so because all windows installs are essentially the same.
Attacks on your NIC in not something I'd lose sleep over simply because there are so darn many nics. I have enough trouble simply getting the authorized drivers to run on a dozen nics of the same model number consistently. How much harder would it be to get an exploit to run over the wire on all but the tiniest fraction of installed nics.