The low risk and low-to-no budget of a home lab environment often results in security taking a back seat. Services are sometimes left open and unguarded in the name of “Just Make It Work”. Home labs aside, the complexity of running even a halfway-decent security infrastructure makes doing so a non-starter even in many small business environments.

As a result, the largest and most easily exploitable gap you’re bound to find in many home labs and small networks is unencrypted traffic. This of course allows for a variety of attack methods against locally-hosted services.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as my home lab and local area network have matured over the years, both I and my family have come to depend on the assortment of services that I run strictly within the four walls of our home. Knowing that our data is physically secure, we often tend to take other forms of security for granted.