Dark side of smart homes: When virtual assistant wants to know everything.

Why is your CEO’s living room now part of the cyberattack surface?

Smart homes were designed to make life easier. But for today’s executives, that convenience comes with a hidden cost: their houses are quietly becoming extensions of your corporate network—and new entry points for attackers.

Think about it. Voice assistants, smart locks, cameras, kids’ tablets, visiting guests’ phones… all using the same home Wi-Fi that also connects your CEO’s work laptop.
No segmentation, no monitoring, no enterprise-grade protection. Just a house full of connected devices—and an open door for cyber risks.

The result?
A blind spot big enough for attackers to slip into conversations, metadata, patterns, and behaviours happening inside executive homes.

Let’s break down what’s really going on behind those “smart” walls.

Smart homes: Convenience or a hidden corporate risk?

The modern corporate perimeter has expanded far beyond office cubicles, cloud systems, and VPN tunnels. See how remote work is broadening corporate risk perimeters in our blog: Remote Work’s Open Doors: The New Security Crisis. It now includes the living rooms, home offices, and private networks of your leadership.

The reality of smart home risk

• Smart homes often contain over 20 connected devices, from voice assistants to smart locks to IP cameras, vastly widening the attack surface.
• Many IoT devices suffer from weak authentication, default passwords, or a lack of standardized security protocols. (SIIT)
• Smart IoT malware and botnets are growing aggressively, with millions of infected devices being hijacked globally.

With so many devices, the home network becomes a fertile ground for intrusions that have real consequences.

What makes smart homes a hacker’s paradise

High-value targets in weak environments

Executives and C-suite members hold strategic knowledge, IP, and access tokens, making their environments lucrative targets.

Lack of enterprise-grade security

Unlike corporate networks, most residential networks:

• Do not segment traffic between corporate and personal devices.
• Use consumer Wi-Fi without rigorous access controls.
• Host IoT devices that rarely get security updates. (SIIT)

Metadata and silent leakage

Even if encrypted network traffic metadata (such as timing, volume, and patterns) can reveal sensitive activity and known risks in IoT environments. (arXiv)

Common attacks on smart homes

• Camera hijacking
• Voice assistant spoofing
• IoT botnet recruitment
• Wi-Fi hijacking via weak devices

These modes allow attackers to harvest personal data or pivot into more critical endpoints.

Note: A common belief among many organizations is that “we use VPNs, we are safe”.

Factually, VPNs secure data in transit but not the location, time, or manner of movement. 

The cost of ignoring the threat

Financial fallout

Data breach costs are historically high:

• The global average cost of a breach is now around USD 4.88 million, the highest since the pandemic. (Network World)
• In the United States, average breach costs can exceed USD 9 million. (Network World)

These figures reflect enterprise breaches, but if an IoT compromise leads to corporate IP leaks or board meeting secrets going public, the financial and reputational damage could exceed those averages.

Reputation and liability

Should a breach be traced back to a CEO’s smart home device?

• Stakeholder trust erodes quickly.
• Public scrutiny intensifies.
• Executives could face questions about their shared responsibility for security.

The solution: Smart homes demand smarter security

Here’s what modern executive-home protection must look like today—functional, efficient, and built to enterprise standards.

• Extend zero trust to home networks: Authorization of each user, each connection, each device. Trust nothing by default.  

• Create meaningful networks:
  – Corporate-grade Wi-Fi: For work laptops and VDI access.
  – IoT/Guest network: To use smart devices and personal tablets–no crossovers.

• Harden executive endpoints: Enforce strong configurations, apply strict access control policies, and use modern endpoint detection tools.

• Audit IoT supply chains: Understand who built each device, how often it receives updates, and whether security patches are actually applied.

• Basic training in security at home: Security at home isn’t just IT’s job—the family ecosystem must understand risks. A gaming console on the main Wi-Fi can be a vector for attackers.

How does Intwo move the needle?  

Here’s where Intwo steps in:  

• Designing home-ready and hybrid security systems.  

• Taking advantage of the built-in Microsoft cloud security.  

• Adopting executive network monitoring and segmentation.  

• Setting the home-to-enterprise connectivity governance models.  

• Providing executive and family-specific household security training.  

With your office spilling out into your homes, you will require some sensible policy, smart management, disciplined buying, and round-the-clock watchfulness.  

The frontier is no longer where it was.

Your next move?

Smart homes aren’t a future vulnerability—they’re an active one, constantly collecting data and expanding your enterprise risk surface.

Instead of asking, should we care? 

Ask, “How long are we willing to go without taking action?” 

Secure your home. Protect your enterprise.

Ready to defend the new frontier?

Talk to us—at Intwo. Rest assured—we’ve got you covered.