Your house is now part of the company network
The weakest device on your home Wi-Fi is now a path into your work.
The office used to be a place with a door, a firewall, and someone whose job was to watch both. Work moved into the house, and the firewall mostly stayed behind.
What replaced it is a home network that wasn't built to carry this weight. The same Wi-Fi runs your laptop, the kids' tablets, a smart TV, a doorbell camera, a thermostat, and whatever the last houseguest connected. Every one of those is a device, and the cheapest, least-updated one sets the floor for all of them.
That matters because an attacker doesn't have to beat your work laptop. They have to beat the weakest thing sharing its network, then move sideways. A camera running firmware from three years ago is a quieter way in than a managed work machine with a security team behind it.
The single best move is a wall, not a product. Most home routers can run a second network, usually called a guest network. Put the work laptop on one side and everything else, especially the cheap smart gadgets, on the other. Now a compromised doorbell can't see the machine your livelihood runs on. source
After that, the unglamorous list. Change the router's admin password from whatever came printed on the sticker. Let it install its updates. Turn off remote administration unless you truly use it. Rename the networks so you actually know which is which. None of this takes special gear. source
A home network review is an hour of looking at what's actually connected and drawing one line through the middle. For anyone working from home with real stakes on that laptop, it's the highest return hour you'll spend on security this year.
Castle Haven Solutions does security assessments, hardening, and fractional CISO work, including incident response planning, for businesses and homes across South Florida and remotely. If this raised a question about your own setup, that's the conversation to have.
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