How are they casually finding these home assistant servers? I sure hope people dont have port 8123 exposed publicly like that? Are you all broadcasting it in to the ether?

It’s been that case since forever now. Nothing has really changed and the same rules still apply.

I still remember ‘hacking’ my ISP ADSL router 2+ decades ago and listening to the WAN interface. Hundreds of thousands of attempts per day in the early 2000s. Mostly US, Russia and China.

My personal #1 threat on the internet for the past 20 years has been DDOS and thanks to billions of IOT devices and privacy invading ‘smart’ appliances everywhere… The botnets have never been this plenty. DDOS as a Service for mere cents a day.

LLM’s joined the fray in recent years but it still can’t do anything it hasn’t learned from us humans.