2.Hacking the Home to Hack the Office By Suhail Ansari, Dattatraya Kulkarni and Steve Povolny  The increasingly dense overlay of numerous connected devices, apps and web services used in our professional and private lives will grow the connected home’s attack surface to the point that it raises significant new risks for individuals and their employers.  While the threat to connected homes is not new, what is new is the emergence of increased functionality in both home and business devices, and the fact that these devices connect to each other more than ever before. Compounding this is the increase in remote work – meaning many of us are using these connected devices more than ever. In 2020,the global pandemic shifted employees from the office to the home, making the home environment a work environment. In fact, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, McAfee Secure Home Platform device monitoring shows a 22% increase in the number of connected home devices globally and a 60% increase in the U.S. Over 70% of the traffic from these devices originated from smart phones, laptops, other PCs and TVs, and over 29% originated from IoT devices such as streaming devices, gaming consoles, wearables, and smart lights.McAfee saw cybercriminals increase their focus on the home attack surface with a surge in various phishing message schemes across communications channels. The number of malicious phishing links McAfee blocked grew over 21% from March to November, at an average of over 400 links per home.   This increase is significant and suggests a flood of phishing messages with malicious links entered home networks through devices with weaker security measures.   Millions of individual employees have become responsible for their employer’s IT security in a home office filled with “soft” targets, unprotected devices from the kitchen, to the family room, to the bedroom. Many of these home devices are “orphaned” in that their manufacturers fail to properly support them with security updates addressing new threats or vulnerabilities.  This contrasts with a corporate office environment filled with devices “hardened” by enterprise-grade security measures. We now work with consumer-grade networking equipment configured by “us” and lacking the central management, regular software updates and security monitoring of the enterprise.   Because of this, we believe cybercriminals will advance the home as an attack surface for campaigns targeting not only our families but also corporations. The hackers will take advantage of the home’s lack of regular firmware updates, lack of security mitigation features, weak privacy policies, vulnerability exploits, and user susceptibility to social engineering.  By compromising the home environment, these malicious actors will launch a variety of attacks on corporate as well as consumer devices in 2021.