[masraum]

As stated, the user is the first line of defense.

There are things you can do that can make your experience more secure, but even then, there are ways around almost any of it.

If you have a VPN, that's great. If someone does not have access to your computer, and only has access to see the stream of traffic leaving your PC, then being on a VPN will help. But, if that person is on a shared network with you, then they may not care about the data in your VPN. Then they may be looking to just access your computer directly, which would have nothing to do with your traffic through the VPN if you have an open/listening port that they can manage to connect to.

You can harden your OS, even Windows can have the security cranked up. Windows by default comes with various services enabled (granted, it's much better than it used to be). You can probably find a document online with advice on how to disable unnecessary services and that sort of thing to improve security.