Days of the Honeynet is a great vignette on all the Not Fun Things that can happen when you intentionally let your guard down in the wild, wild, web [ and internet ]:

:Among other benefits, running a honeynet makes one acutely aware about “what is going on” out there. While placing a network IDS outside one’s firewall might also provide a similar flood of alerts, a honeypot provides a unique prospective on what will be going on when a related server is compromised used by the intruders.

As a result of our research, many gigabytes of network traffic dumps are piling up on the hard drives, databases are filling with alerts, rootkits and exploit-pack collections are growing.”