It's just an NTP pool. The device is trying to update it's time. Likely it made many other requests to other servers when this one didn't work.
Maintaining up to date lists of anything is a game of whack a mole, so you're always going to get weird results.
If you're actually unsure, pcap the traffic on your pfsense box and see for yourself. NTP is an unencrypted protocol, so tshark or Wireshark will have no problem telling you all about it.
That said, I'd still agree with the other poster about local integration with home assistant and just block that sucker from the Internet.
Agreed. To add to this because the traffic is being blocked it keeps retrying so it's inflating the traffic size. I have about 14 tplink WiFi switches on a vlan and my pfsense rule for NTP is less than 6 megabytes. OP is conflating legitimate NTP traffic with Tor.
You're the one that connected an impossible-to-security-update device to the internet. You can do plenty of home automation without it needing to be that way, if you're open to a little more setup being involved in the process.
I have no idea of all the details, but in legal terms this is called "res ipsa loquitur" -- in this case, the fact that it clearly seems compromised is pretty solid evidence that it wasn't immune to compromise.
That's really odd. For what it's worth though, the company I work for does firmware updates over a Tor hidden service for customer privacy. We don't send any data though (as that would defeat the purpose entirely), just poll for updates then download and install if there are any.
I went to ask nicely for help from their support department and got a development build for one of their routers. Not only was it an ancient version of OpenWRT with the myriad of unpatched vulnerabilities, but it had absolutely dumb/weird configurations like the Wi-Fi password being a user account password exposed to a patched up SSH daemon with shell /bin/false. Just a whole lot of why and an obvious lack of care put into the software.
Their devices function... Most of the time. That's about all that's redeeming.
Fwiw the TP link bulbs usually have a local API that Home Assistant has an integration for. You can use that and block their internet access - unless they've removed that feature. I only used one of these briefly because someone gave it to me. Usually just use cheap ZigBee bulbs. I would throw that one out though as someone else said it's likely been compromised already...
The zigbee bulbs I've had the best luck with are Innr, although they are kind of pricy. Ikea bulbs are good for the price, but every one I have, has very loud coil whine when off. I had some on bedside stands and had to move them to other rooms. Sengled are nice when they work, I've had issues with them dropping off my network.
Both Ikea and Innr are also repeaters, Sengled does not do repeaters in their bulbs. Neither Ikea or Innr are exactly cheap, but they've been the most solid for me.
The thing is it still impacts the other Wifi Channels and Networks (or at least those on the same band, guessing mist IoT uses 2.4GHz) even tho other Channels are used.
But, i see the appeal, since most smart home devices you can get cheap are Wifi connected. Hope that changes with the ESP32-H2 and -C6. Those are relatively recently released.
Wifi is just such a heavy proticol for just sending sensor data and some commands around, imho.