Lawmakers Urge Commerce Department to Ban China-Linked Router Company

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โ€˜China is not our friend, and we should not bring CCP-controlled equipment into American homes,โ€™ Sen. Cynthia Lummis said.

A bicameral group of 17 Republican lawmakers is urging Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to ban the sales of networking equipment from TP-Link, saying that the company has โ€œdeep tiesโ€ to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Led by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.), the lawmakers sent a letter, dated May 14, to Lutnick, calling TP-Link โ€œa state-sponsored networking equipment companyโ€ that poses โ€œa clear and present danger.โ€

โ€œChina is not our friend, and we should not bring CCP-controlled equipment into American homes,โ€ Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who cosigned the letter, wrote on the social media platform X on May 14.

โ€œProud to join my colleagues in supporting [Commerce Departmentโ€™s] investigation of TP-Link and urging swift action to prohibit sales.โ€

The lawmakers stated that Chinese state cyber actors โ€œhave exploitedโ€ the companyโ€™s small and home office (SOHO) products, such as Wi-Fi routers, cellular gateways, and mobile hotspots, in their cyber campaigns against the United States.

โ€œCCP agents commonly exploit SOHO routers because those systems have ideal bandwidth and computing power for sustained cyber activities but lack additional layers of security common in enterprise networks,โ€ the letter reads.

Citing an advisory released by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in February 2024, the lawmakers warned that the Chinese regime โ€œuses SOHO equipment for ongoing espionage and targeting of critical infrastructure to pre-position itself for destructive attacks on Americans and communication channels with our allies.โ€

The CISA advisory named a Chinese threat actor group, Volt Typhoon, and how it used the technique of multi-hop proxies composed of virtual private servers or SOHO routers to carry out its cyber attacks.

In October 2024, Microsoft reported that a Chinese botnet known as CovertNetwork-1658 had hijacked many SOHO routers, the majority of which were manufactured by TP-Link, to carry out โ€œhighly evasive password spray attacks.โ€ Microsoft added that its operation was discovered in August 2023, and the botnet consisted of about 8,000 compromised devices at any given time.

The lawmakers also warned that TP-Link โ€œis subject to Chinaโ€™s National Security Law,โ€ thus allowing the CCP to gain access to U.S. systems via the companyโ€™s devices, โ€œbefore American authorities know a vulnerability exists.โ€

Byย Frank Fang

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