3 Real Incidents That Exposed Hidden Threats in My Smart Home Network

At ZimaSpace, we’re all about equipping makers, tinkerers, and homelab enthusiasts with compact yet seriously capable hardware that runs 24/7 without draining your electricity bill. That’s why we’re excited to adapt and share this in-depth guide from BeardedTinker, a passionate smart-home and homelab YouTuber known for turning complex infrastructure projects into practical, real-world tutorials on his channel.

Thank you, BeardedTinker, for creating such a thorough and transparent video. We’ve turned the original transcript into this polished English blog post so even more readers in the tech community can benefit from it. The goal? To show exactly how the ZimaBoard 2 — our hyper-performance single board home server — powers a professional-grade yet approachable SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system that gives your smart home and homelab true visibility into what’s happening on the network.

Two weeks ago at 2:13 in the morning, something started scanning the network: SSH, then HTTPS, then Home Assistant. Bots constantly scan IP ranges looking for exposed services, but the real question is not whether this happens. The real question is: would your smart home even notice?

That single thought sparked an entire project that took over four months of planning, testing, and iteration. Today we break it down step by step so you can decide if a SIEM belongs in your own setup.

What SIEM Actually Is (and Why It Matters at Home)

SIEM stands for Security Information and Event Management. In plain terms, it collects logs from every device on your network and then correlates them to spot patterns that individual systems would miss. A lone firewall drop might look harmless. But when the SIEM sees a port scan from the same IP, followed by failed logins on your NAS, followed by an authentication success on Home Assistant, it suddenly tells a complete story.

For most simple smart homes this is overkill. Once your setup starts looking more like real infrastructure instead of just gadgets, visibility becomes extremely useful — because the biggest problem in most home networks is not attacks, it’s simply not knowing what is happening.

The Architecture: Independent Monitoring Is Everything

The most important design decision was to run the SIEM completely outside the systems it monitors. Monitoring systems should always be independent from the systems they are monitoring. If Home Assistant crashes or the NAS goes offline, the SIEM must still be able to see and record it.

In this architecture:

• UniFi firewall and IDS logs flow in via syslog.
• Synology NAS authentication events are forwarded.
• Home Assistant itself sends structured events through a custom Wazuh agent add-on.

All signals land in one place where correlation rules turn raw logs into actionable alerts.

Hardware Choice: Why ZimaBoard 2 Is the Perfect Low-Power Home Server

For the SIEM server itself, BeardedTinker chose ZimaBoard hardware — specifically the ZimaBoard 2, the hyper-performance single board home server that runs Plex, Pi-hole, Proxmox, or even Minecraft 24/7 while staying cool and silent.

ZimaBoard 2 handles media streaming, firewalls, homelabs, and AI containers with ease. Low power, high reliability.

Native SATA & PCIe — no hats, no hassles. Plug in 2.5" HDDs/SSDs, install a 10G NIC, GPU, or NVMe adapter and it’s ready for personal storage or expansion needs. Dual 2.5G Ethernet built-in makes it ideal for fast local NAS, low-latency remote access, or routing multiple network services at home.

You can run what works for you — ZimaOS, TrueNAS, Proxmox, Debian, pfSense… Users love testing different OS setups for backups, Plex servers, Docker labs, or cluster builds.

Small, hackable, and kind of cute — many call it a mini server that looks like a toy but runs like a beast. Perfect for creative DIYers and tech lovers who want a reliable always-on home server without the noise and heat of a traditional mini PC.

Compared with a full mini PC (which often idles at 20–40 W), the ZimaBoard 2 sips far less power, making it the smart choice for infrastructure that must run 24/7.

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Operating System and SIEM Platform

The operating system chosen was Ubuntu LTS installed directly on bare metal — no hypervisor, no extra layers. Monitoring infrastructure should be boring and predictable.

The SIEM platform is Wazuh — open-source, widely used, and surprisingly capable for prosumer setups. Installation is done via straightforward command-line commands. The real work, however, begins after installation: connecting every piece of infrastructure and feeding it clean logs.

All custom rules, decoders, and detection logic used in the video are freely available in BeardedTinker’s public GitHub repository (links in the original video description).

Three Real Incidents — And How the SIEM Reacted

Incident 1: Reconnaissance scan

From another machine, simple PowerShell connection attempts were made to multiple ports. Within seconds the UniFi firewall logged the activity. The SIEM parsed the syslog, applied correlation rules, and flagged port-scanning behavior because multiple ports were touched from the same IP in a short time window.

Incident 2: Failed logins on the NAS

Several failed login attempts were made against the Synology interface. NAS systems are actually one of the most interesting infrastructure components to monitor because they produce rich signals: login attempts, authentication failures, permission changes. Once those logs reached the SIEM, they were automatically correlated with the earlier network events.

Incident 3: Home Assistant authentication events

Failed login attempts followed by a successful login were triggered on Home Assistant. Thanks to the custom Wazuh agent add-on (also created by BeardedTinker and available on GitHub), these events became visible inside the SIEM exactly like any other infrastructure signal.

If Home Assistant is compromised, the consequences are not just digital — it controls real physical devices.

Bringing SIEM Alerts Back into Home Assistant

The beauty of the setup is that the data does not stay trapped inside the monitoring platform. SIEM data can be exposed as sensors and summary metrics directly inside Home Assistant. Security score, incident counts, recent triggered rules — everything appears on dashboards and can trigger automations: notifications, temporary disabling of remote access, camera activation, or increased logging.

BeardedTinker has also opened an architecture discussion in the Home Assistant community proposing better structured logs and security event streams. If you care about observability, the link is in the video description.

Final Thoughts and Resources

A system like this is definitely not for everyone. It requires hardware, configuration, and curiosity. But if your smart home is slowly evolving into real infrastructure, this level of visibility is incredibly valuable.

Everything shown — rules, integrations, the Home Assistant Wazuh agent, and the dashboard examples — is published in public repositories. If you run a similar setup in your own homelab, the community would love to hear what you’re monitoring and what you would add next.

At ZimaSpace we believe the ZimaBoard 2 is the ideal home server foundation for exactly these kinds of advanced, always-on projects. Low power, native expandability, dual 2.5G networking, and rock-solid reliability make it the perfect platform whether you’re running a SIEM, a media server, a firewall, or an entire homelab cluster.

Watch the original video here for the full live demonstrations

If this post inspired you to level up your own home server security and monitoring, drop a comment below or head over to the ZimaBoard 2 product page to see how it can power your next project.

Stay visible, stay secure, and happy hacking! 🚀