3 June 2024

Bye Bye Bad Chinese Routers

Rebecca Grant

At last, Congress is poised to protect Americans from one of China’s top cyber weapons: cheap network routers. Led by U.S. Representatives Bob Latta (R-OH) and Mary Peltola (D-AK), the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee voted 43-0 to advance the Removing Our Unsecure Technologies to Ensure Reliability and Security or ROUTERS Act.

“The ROUTERS Act is an important, bipartisan bill that will help ensure our communications networks are secure from threats posed by foreign adversary-controlled technology in the United States,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA).

That’s the good news. The bad news is that U.S. government agencies, including NASA, the General Services Administration and the Department of Defense, reportedly have already purchased routers by Chinese company TP-Link.

Even if Congress passes the ROUTERS Act, this is only the beginning of the effort to protect this country from Chinese digital espionage. More needs to be done. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community need to re-examine their own networks to ensure that hackable Chinese routers are removed.

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