It’s been a rough week for Chinese companies in the U.S. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, and drone manufacturer DJI are both balancing the bubble under the scrutiny and glare of the U.S. government. And now, in the wake of a damning Microsoft report, America’s most popular internet router is facing a potential ban from operating in the U.S. as early as next year.
Whoops, your internet is leaking
Concerns about TP-Link’s vulnerabilities aren’t coming out of left field. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party urged an investigation into TP-Link back in August 2024, speculating that they were susceptible to hacking and data harvesting.
And then Microsoft released a report on October 31, 2024 with the spooky news that “since August 2023, Microsoft has observed intrusion activity targeting and successfully stealing credentials from multiple Microsoft customers that is enabled by highly evasive password spray attacks.”
The report refers to it as a “nation-state threat actor” only once, but it notes that “Microsoft assesses that a threat actor located in China established and maintains this network. The threat actor exploits a vulnerability in the routers to gain remote code execution capability,’ and that “…routers manufactured by TP-Link make up most of this network.” Now the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Justice, and Defense are all investigating TP-Link.
yeah, router. what’s that again?
So what’s a router? It works in tandem with a modem, which brings the internet to your home. Through the cables in your building, it acts as a middleman. The router itself is another middleman that connects the modem to your consumer devices: computers, smartphones, tablets, and any number of goods part of the Internet of Things, such as smart home devices, security systems, some audio equipment, and more. Basically, if you want the internet in a building, you’ve got to have a modem and a router.
According to The Wall Street Journal, TP-Link routers appear in contracts that supply numerous government agencies, including the NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. Also mentioned by the Journal is that 64.9% of the routers in the U.S. are from TP-Link, giving it a wide margin as America’s preferred router brand.
Why? They’re fast, fairly reliable, and cheap. Reviewers from Wirecutter to PCMag and, well, almost everywhere laud them as the top picks among routers, and so consumers flock to them like ambitious politicians toward a headline-grabbing… Oops. Too soon?
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