This 100%. I'm in a space with developers and customers deploying web servers for the first time. This traffic freaks them out.

Basically a simple server listening on a port will experience hundreds of random script-probing attacks per day. And if any of them show the slightest hint of succeeding then that escalates quickly to thousands per minute.

You don't need a DNS entry to "expose" the IP address (there are only 4 billion). Moving to another port reduces, but doesn't eliminate the traffic.

Telling people this freaks them out. But as long as the server is done well its just noise.

Yesterday it was 4 seconds from a LE cert -> scans for .env and other low hanging info leak/vulnerabilities from at least 4 different scanners.

There are groups out there just looking at the certificate transparency logs to get the newly added certs to scan.

Yeah, one of the reasons why I started to for all my dev side projects to be under a single wildcard subdomain, because I used to create new certs automatically with letsencrypt and everytime this spam happened. If I do things right it shouldn't matter, but I still feel better with the wildcard if I was to make a mistake...

Short related story: some customer wanted an API with a basic firewall, they said they don't need filter rules as it won't be used or something. I put a dumb API online (doing nothing) and showed them the request logs after one day. They approved the filter rules immediately.