In general the ME will only be listening for network traffic if you've enabled AMT functionality (which is restricted to certain enterprise SKUs and has require

In general the ME will only be listening for network traffic if you've enabled AMT functionality (which is restricted to certain enterprise SKUs and has requirements around which networking hardware is used and so on). Otherwise, the ME will expose a PCI device implementing the Host Embedded Controller Interface (HECI) and OS drivers can bind to that to offer an interface to applications.