If you are exposing your Home Assistant instance directly to the Internet, you are playing Russian roulette with your local network. It only takes one zero-day vulnerability in a custom integration to give a botnet full access to your smart home and everything else on your LAN. But we live in a connected world. You still need a way for external services—like a GPS tracker on your car, a webhook from a Garmin watch, or a custom script running on a remote VPS to push data into your home.

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