It is not a myth. I know every service running on my personal machines (the Ubuntu workstations at work do get away from me a bit...) Here's the practical upsh

It is not a myth. I know every service running on my personal machines (the Ubuntu workstations at work do get away from me a bit...) Here's the practical upshot - once, many moons ago, I forwarded port 22 to my home desktop machine so I could access it remotely. I had fail2ban running and regularly checked the logs, so I wasn't worried. What I didn't realize was that maybe 6 months prior I'd made a test account for some purpose, with 'test' as the username and password. Inevitably, some worm managed to guess this combo in less than the 6 tries before fail2ban kicked in. The kicker, though? I was sitting at the machine when it happened, and I could tell immediately. The HDD light was flashing, and I knew it shouldn't be. There was load on the CPU, and I knew there shouldn't be. Checked 'top', spotted the weird process immediately, killed it, locked the account (it never escaped the test account so no harm done) and went on with my day. Can you imagine that story on Windows? "My hard drive light is blinking and I don't know why" - yep, that's daily life. "There's a weird process in the list" - yep, there's lots of those, good luck tracking down which company is responsible.