TP-Link is the bestselling router on Amazon—and has been linked to Chinese cyberattacks
U.S. authorities are investigating whether a Chinese company whose popular home-internet routers have been linked to cyberattacks poses a national-security risk and are considering banning the devices.
The router-manufacturer TP-Link, established in China, has roughly 65% of the U.S. market for routers for homes and small businesses. It is also the top choice on Amazon, and powers internet communications for the Defense Department and other federal government agencies.
Investigators at the Commerce, Defense and Justice departments have opened their own probes into the company, and authorities could ban the sale of TP-Link routers in the U.S. next year, according to people familiar with the matter. An office of the Commerce Department has subpoenaed TP-Link, some of the people said. Action against the company would likely fall to the incoming Trump administration, which has signaled an aggressive approach to China.
Alternate Coverage: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/u-s-weighs-ban-on-chinese-made-router-in-millions-of-american-homes/ar-AA1w51es
Welp, there (probably) goes my main source of OpenWRT hardware. Ugh.
Also, assuming there is anything to this (I’m taking it with a huge grain of salt myself), is there any reason to suspect that replacing the firmware with OpenWRT wouldn’t address the issue?
Can’t give US Corpos money that way… gotta buy US hardware. 'Murica!
It’s not about the hw I think
If it’s a compromised hardware UART or Eprom you’re not gonna fix it with a firmware or even OS change.
Nothing in the article suggests it’s anything more than poorly maintained firmware.
So when are Cisco and the other US brands stopping their hard-coded credential security holes that pop up every year or two? Because those are a lot less theoretical than this kind of crap.
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Just their routers? I buy their PCIe network cards all the time. I chose them specifically because their corporate headquarters are in the US. Guessing I screwed that one up, huh?
If the issue is, as the article suggests, unpatched router firmware vulnerabilities, then you should still be good.
Dodged a bullet then, sweet! I’ll be looking elsewhere for my next batch at least.
The company’s market dominance has been achieved in part through lower prices. Its routers are cheaper than competitors, often by more than half, according to market data.
American router companies have also been linked to major hacks. U.S. investigators have linked some recent intrusions into critical infrastructure, attributed to a Chinese hacking group dubbed Volt Typhoon, to aging routers built by Silicon Valley-based Cisco Systems and Netgear.
Nevertheless, those attacks have underscored the vulnerabilities posed by unpatched routers, which give hackers an easy vector for an attack, and possible additional risks posed by foreign-made routers.
It does sort of sound like they just saw an opportunity to kick out the cheaper competition.
Yup. Here’s how I see it:
- American routers - utter crap, and targeted by Chinese hackers
- Chinese routers - utter crap, but not targeted (yet) by Chinese hackers, probably because they already have backdoors
Blocking Chinese routers doesn’t solve the utter crap problem.
And this is why I use Mikrotik:
- not Chinese
- seem to care about security
- used by big orgs, so a vulnerability would be big news
- more features than I’ll need
- not cheap, but affordable
I have a separate access point as well by Ubiquiti. My reasons:
- can upgrade wireless without touching router config
- no trade-off between router and wireless features, I can choose them independently
- AP and router don’t need to be in the same place (nor should they be)
Don’t buy cheap crap, buy entry level enterprise equipment instead.
Mikrotik is solid until Russia annexes Latvia
Unless I’ve been looking at the wrong ones, a basic Mikrotik router isn’t terribly expensive? $70 isn’t horrible (for a non-wireless router, id be using a separate WAP)
Yeah, I think mine was $80. You can get a consumer router with built-in wireless for about that much, so once you add in the AP ($100-150), it’s more. But you get more flexibility and features.
But yeah, for an enterprise grade router, they’re pretty cheap.
Fuck… installing OpenWRT wouldn’t eliminate this threat vector, would it?
Depends if and where there may be something funky. If it’s just insecure default firmware, then yes. If it’s some kind of low-level vulnerability that can be remotely exploited, no.
If there is something to this, I’m leaning toward the former.
Goddammit…
Archive of the MSN version:
Awesome! Just bought one…how fucked am I?
There is a good chance nothing comes of this.
