US may ban the sale of TP-Link routers

Ice Tea

Ice Tea

Ice Tea

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www.theregister.com

US mulls TP-Link routers ban on national security concerns

It could end up like Huawei -Trump's gonna get ya, get ya, get ya
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com

TP-Link has about 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses. It also partners with more than 300 internet service providers in the US to supply routers for new customer installations, according to the WSJ. The China-based manufacturer's gear is also reportedly used by the Department of Defense and other federal government agencies.
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I never realised that they had such a large chunk of the market, i wrongly thought that Netgear was the biggest.
 
It’s a good job Cisco and Netgear don’t have some really uncomfortable history when it comes to unpatched vuln’s and being used for botnets, or they would have to ban them. Oh… they’re not Chinese owned brands.
 
It's simply protectionism. If there were security concerns around vulnerable hardware then they'd stop Asus routers from being imported.
 
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According to pcgamer article HERE it is not known how the routers are being infected and most of the affected routers are from Bulgaria, Russia, US and Ukraine.
 
One of the TP Link devices cited is 15 years old, other devices compromised are from a Canadian NAS vendor, Zyxel, and Ruckus. Any focus on one vendors products being vulnerable is missing an opportunity to tackle how EOL devices connected to the wider internet are managed, and what the requirements for firmware support from companies putting products on the market should be.
 
Avalon said:
It’s a good job Cisco and Netgear don’t have some really uncomfortable history when it comes to unpatched vuln’s and being used for botnets, or they would have to ban them. Oh… they’re not Chinese owned brands.
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As per my posts this year:

Rroff said:
Possibly - where I work has had 3 lots of disruption this year due to "unexpected technical issues" in systems either on our end or with service providers we use who provide a service to a wider number of businesses, which given my level of experience with IT and knowing how things work normally IMO are almost certainly due to either malicious tampering or attempted intrusion rather than bugs, etc.
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Rroff said:
Interestingly around the same time as BA had "technical issues" today we were hit with a large scale and sophisticated, though not very effective, cyberattack at work - we are completely unrelated to BA. From what I can see it didn't achieve much other than some disruption, temporarily knocking systems offline, but doesn't seem to have infected anything or compromised any systems, at least not according to IT or from my understanding of what has happened, despite penetrating the network enough to cause disruption.

Bit of a weird one as it seems to have affected quite specific hardware within the network which I guess had some kind of vulnerability but I don't think we were the intended target hence it wasn't very effective - I'm guessing that hardware was hit broadly.
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We've had 2 instances at work of Western brand enterprise routing/access point hardware having vulnerabilities exploited, fortunately we ourselves weren't the intended target and our data doesn't seem to have been compromised, but vulnerabilities were used to compromise certain hardware and attempt to attack another target degrading the performance and/or functionality of our systems.

EDIT: When I said doesn't seem to have infected/compromised anything in the quote above I meant beyond the initial point of vulnerability.
 
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