US Gov. Considering a Ban on TP-Link Devices

[NT2C]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/12/18/us-considers-ban-on-chinese-made-tp-link-routers-heres-why/

[Raptor]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/12/18/us-considers-ban-on-chinese-made-tp-link-routers-heres-why/

Seriously if there is one device that you would want to be able compromise at will, it would be a router.

Can you imagine how many of these routers are out there and the massive communication failure that would occur if a bad actor sent in effect a "bricking" command.

[NT2C]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/12/18/us-considers-ban-on-chinese-made-tp-link-routers-heres-why/

Seriously if there is one device that you would want to be able compromise at will, it would be a router.

Can you imagine how many of these routers are out there and the massive communication failure that would occur if a bad actor sent in effect a "bricking" command.

That would be hardly worth the effort though, at least to your average bad actor.  The real issue is that control of those routers allows control of the attached computer systems as bots.  Your average router is going to have around a half dozen to a few dozen devices (just on my system there's 36 devices and we can't run things like Alexa or Google devices due to my wife's job) connected to it.  Everything from a full up PC or laptop down to a smart dishwasher.  Each of those devices can be taken and used as a bot to execute attacks on websites, servers, etc.  While there might be a few million routers involved, now we're talking about possibly tens of millions of bots being controlled.