Oh, sure, no one is targeting me specifically.

Its only swarms of bots and scripts going through the entire internet, including me.

iptables and fail2ban should be installed pretty early, and then - just watch the logs.

I think this is very dangerous perspective. A lot of attacks on infra are automated, just try to expose a Windows XP machine to the internet for a day and see with how much malware you end up with. If you leave your security unchecked, you will end up attacked; not by someone targeting you specifically, but having all your data encrypted for ransom might still create a problem for you (even if the attacker doesn’t care about YOUR data specifically).

Once, when I was young and inexperienced, I left a server exposed to the Internet by accident (I accidentally exposed a user with username postgres, password postgres). In hours the machine had been hacked to run a botnet. Was I stupid? Yes. But I absolutely wasn't a high-profile enough person to "be a target" - clearly someone was just scanning IP addresses.

Crying inside myself after a crypto miner took my VM this past week.

And mine last year