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Not every server is useful for gathering intelligence on a nation either it seems.

Thinking about it, if you want secret information by definition only a tiny fraction of the networks out there are going to have it— anything most of them have wouldn’t be a secret anymore. So any attackers are going to focus the majority of their energy on exfiltrating data from the most likely/productive extreme minority of their infiltrated networks.

State level actors wouldn’t typically do that. Better to leave a low value target unexploited to increase the useful lifespan of the exploit rather than find some minor utility for low value hosts.

It used to be that botnets for ddos were valuable, too, and you'd think some sort of low-effort crypto miner could be uploaded or something. Seems odd even without the email benefit that they'd just not follow up at all.

Low effort cryptominer or ddos drone sounds exactly like the kind of thing that'll get you caught early. Even if you are actually after profit (and not other goals one would assume with what's claimed to be state-associated hackers), that might not be a good idea.