One of the most common things you hear when talking about security to ordinary people is a variation on the question asked in the subject: Who would want to hack my desktop, laptop, phone, router, intelligent thermostat, smoke detector, etc.
The easy answer is that any cyber-criminal who wants plausible deniability would.
Any cyber-criminal redirects their network activity through a collection of compromised devices which can include some surprisingly modest devices – I wasn’t joking about smoke detectors!
Of course routing rogue traffic through your devices isn’t the only thing that is possible – they can use their access to your devices to sniff on what you are doing or use their access to further compromise other devices. Whilst you may not visit your bank’s website using your smoke detector, once someone has access to your smoke detector, they can use that access to attack other devices on your network.
With or without lots of technical details, the fix is to keep things updated – not just the obvious computers like your laptop, but also the devices that come under the banner of the “Internet of Things”.