Your Office Is a Kitchen Table Now
Companion to the Home-Office Security Checklist on ops-notes — all five passes, the quarterly review, and the full crosslinked playbook. Free, no signup.
The company office had an IT department, a locked door, and a network somebody else was paid to worry about. Your new office is a kitchen table with a router that came from a flash sale, a printer shared with the household, and a laptop that moves between the desk, the couch, and a café. None of the old protections followed you. The good news: an hour of deliberate work restores most of them, and a fifteen-minute quarterly review keeps them from decaying again.
Walk the setup in five passes
Pass 1 — The network. Retire the router's default admin password and default Wi-Fi key today; those are printed on a sticker and published on the internet. Update the firmware once now, then put it on a quarterly calendar. Turn on the guest network and put every household device on it — kids' tablets, the smart TV, the doorbell camera. A compromised game console should not be one subnet hop from the machine holding your customer database.
Pass 2 — The devices. Disk encryption on, verified in the settings page — "probably on" is not a status, write down the date you confirmed it. Screen auto-lock at five minutes with immediate password requirement. OS and browser updates on automatic. And the old laptop in the drawer still has cached mail and live session tokens — retire it properly instead of keeping it as a data breach on a shelf.
Pass 3 — Access and secrets. One password manager, no household exceptions: work logins live in the vault, not in the browser's built-in save and not shared with anyone under this roof. MFA everywhere that moves money or holds customer data, email first — whoever owns the mailbox can reset everything else. Split any family-shared admin logins and rotate the passwords. Recovery codes taped in a drawer are a single point of failure with a lock on it; the home twist is asking who else in the house can reach them.
Pass 4 — The physical space. The printer keeps copies of whatever you print — print less, shred what prints. Think about what a video call shows: the customer names in the CRM window behind your head, the whiteboard with the roadmap, the mailbox key on the shelf. Close the lid when unattended. And a home walk is a good moment to notice which keys, fobs, and badges stopped being tracked when the office moved home.
Pass 5 — Backups and the outage plan. The backup target shouldn't live on the same shelf as the laptop — cloud plus one offline copy that isn't always plugged in, encrypted. A backup that's been green for two years but never restored is a hope, not a plan; test the restore, not the backup. Then write the home-outage plan: power cut, dead internet, who gets told, what has a workaround. If only one person in the house can reach the router settings or the vault, that's a row in your single-point-of-failure register with "home" written next to it.
The quarterly review that catches the decay
Home security fails quietly: a new smart device joins the main network "just for setup", a router gets replaced and ships with defaults again, the guest network gets turned off temporarily and stays off. Once a quarter, fifteen minutes: guest network still on, firmware still current, the router's device list still recognizable, MFA still on everywhere it was, last restore-test date still within policy, nothing printed or taped that should have been shredded.
The full checklist is free
The ops-notes page has all five passes in detail, the quarterly review list, and crosslinks into the Wi-Fi, VPN, password-manager, backup-encryption, and restore-drill pages — the whole remote-team security stack, free, no signup.
If you want the printable version, the Hive80 Lab ops kits bundle the incident and continuity checklists as instant downloads — the Ops Field Cards ($4) and the full Ops Mega Bundle ($29) are the two most-used.
The kitchen table can be as safe as the server room. It just has to be decided on purpose.
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