this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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It was popping up in the windows 10 notifications and then the Bluetooth settings app showed it as well, beyond that I'm not sure what to clarify.
Well that is the question I intentionally asked in my 1st comment so yeah that's a good start :P
Considering that it definitely is a Bluetooth device that means it has to be relatively close to your computer. Unless you live in an apartment building and are in range of Bluetooth devices not in your household you should be considering the electronic devices around you.
Do you have any "smart" devices like a baby monitor, a home camera system, vacuum, air purifier or any such thing that has Bluetooth?
Because you are saying that there's no new devices that you can think of, and it does seem suspicious, my thought goes towards a device that is connected to the internet and has potentially been hacked and is now misbehaving. It may not be the case but best to err on the side of caution and you did the right thing by not accepting the connection.
I definitely have some bt devices around the house, but I'm pretty sure they're accounted for in the list of previous connected devices and if it wasn't something I have connected before it seems odd it would be trying to connect out of the blue, and my fiance was sleeping so I know no one in the house was using anything like that. There are some sketchy business on the other side of our back fence, but it's probably JUST close enough for a Bluetooth device to connect to my PC and when I went outside the front shortly after there was no one around (again, 5AM so most people are sleeping). The whole thing was just weird because I haven't had something like this happen in the years of having my PC constantly on in this house and every time I clicked deny access it popped back up, possibly because it was just sending a connect signal and not listening for a denial, but that's merely guessing because I don't have much knowledge on this.
Curious kids, tinkerers and business customers are all other options. Someone might have an app that spams connections to annoy neighbors, someone might be testing their new program/script they wrote, someone might have malware that replicates via bluetooth connections, and yes, someone might be trying to hack into every nearby bluetooth devices. Update your network hardware (modem/routers/wifi APs), don't accept unknown connections, and you should be as safe as can be expected (unless you're sysadmin levels of proficient). If the annoyance gets to be too much, just disable bluetooth when you're not using it (or make it undiscoverable so your devices can stay connected)