Is it more likely? That depends on how often you leave your laptop unattended. :) I, and pretty much every hacker I know, have some machine they can SSH to on

Is it more likely? That depends on how often you leave your laptop unattended. :) I, and pretty much every hacker I know, have some machine they can SSH to on the internet, somewhere. The only added risk is exposing your laptop to an attack against the SSH daemon, which involves either weak passwords, weak/unsecured keys, or an SSH server vulnerability. The first two are easily mitigated. The third is incredibly infrequent, and when it does happen, you've got bigger problems to worry about. Almost all SSH attacks target port 22, not a random high port, so you're unlikely to even see connections to that tunnel in the first place. Finally, you don't even need to trust the remote machine, since SSH will authenticate the laptop's host key through the tunnel. MITM attacks are possible against SSHv1, but pretty much everyone is on v2 these days.