"That's the perk of running Linux on your personal laptop, no one bothers writing malware to target you."
Yet.
Yet.
I assume they fought with each other for control of the machine, but I rebooted it instead.
Try it - it's interesting, use a USB stick to boot it, and make sure to physically disconnect all hard drives.
I think they mostly just want to send spam emails.
ME: "What's so funny?"
Dan: "You see that? Take a closer look."
ME: "What am I even looking at?"
Dan: "Simple script I built to track bots trying to break into our Linux box (server). What you're watching is a metric fuck ton of Chinese and other bots trying to brute force the login."
He explained that any new server being connected to the internet, regardless of OS will be instantly attacked like you said. The server in question was only online for about 30 minutes and we were watching an endless stream of automated attacks from different bots. The failed login attempts were blocked after two attempts and the IP addresses logged for further review; but the bots would just respawn at different IP ranges and try again, it was pretty crazy.
It was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea it was that bad. Man, was I naïve!
Get a large enough user base, and malware will follow, and that may be the reason Linux is still relatively free from malware. Despite advancements, normal people still don't run Linux. It's either IT people or people who had their IT friend/child/whatever install it for them.
With browser extensions being used as delivery platforms, it may not be long until it hits Linux as well. The same delivery method (using a user lauchd job) would work for a user systemd job.