What do net attackers look for?

[Mike Oliver]

I just set up an Ubuntu system and have been spending lots
of time configuring it.  I put tight IP filtering in place
and looking at the logs shows lots of probing.

It occurred to me to wonder, just what are they looking for?
Suppose, hypothetically, that an attacker had been able to guess
my password while I was setting it up, when I was trying to figure
out networking issues and briefly turned off ip6tables to see
if that was the problem.  Would they be able to do anything,
given that I hadn't turned on sshd or telnetd or ftpd?  (A "ps -ef | grep"
on ssh shows something called "ssh-client" or something like that,
but not sshd.)

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