{"id":229056,"date":"2026-03-30T00:31:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T04:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/30\/us-router-ban-is-industrial-policy-not-better-infosec-the-register\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T01:00:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T05:00:14","slug":"us-router-ban-is-industrial-policy-not-better-infosec-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/30\/us-router-ban-is-industrial-policy-not-better-infosec-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"US router ban is \u2018industrial policy&#8217; not better infosec \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/30\/professor_criticizes_fcc_router_ban\/\">US router ban is \u2018industrial policy&#8217; not better infosec \u2022 The Register<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/30\/professor_criticizes_fcc_router_ban\/\">https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/30\/professor_criticizes_fcc_router_ban\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-03-30 00:31:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.theregister.com\">www.theregister.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The United States\u2019 ban on foreign-made SOHO routers won\u2019t improve security, and only makes sense as \u201cindustrial policy disguised as cybersecurity,\u201d according to Milton Mueller, Professor at the University of Georgia\u2019s School of Public Policy and founder of its Internet Governance Project.<\/p>\n<p>Mueller notes that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) justified its ban with two arguments, one of which refers to CISA and FBI analysis that found attackers targeted SOHO routers to build a botnet that hid the Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon intrusions. The other argument relied on a Department of Commerce study that Mueller summarized as finding \u201cthe concentration of 85 percent of the consumer router supply chain in China creates a \u2018systemic vulnerability\u2019 where a single firmware update could be weaponized to disable U.S. home internet access.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The academic thinks neither argument holds water.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe digital economy is global,\u201d he pointed out in a Saturday post. \u201cA router \u2018Made in the USA\u2019 likely runs a Linux kernel maintained by global contributors, uses Wi-Fi drivers written in Taiwan, and incorporates open-source libraries managed by developers worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBy focusing on the geographic location of the assembly line, the FCC ignores the logical supply chain of the software. A U.S.-assembled router with a poorly written UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) implementation is just as vulnerable to a hijacking as a foreign one.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He also points out that the FCC worries about backdoors in routers, when research into the Typhoon gangs found they exploited unpatched bugs, unchanged default device credentials, and bad design that leaves some network ports exposed to the public internet.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPerhaps the most obvious lack of logic in the FCC\u2019s policy is its exclusive focus on new equipment&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/30\/professor_criticizes_fcc_router_ban\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>US router ban is \u2018industrial policy&#8217; not better infosec \u2022 The Register https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/03\/30\/professor_criticizes_fcc_router_ban\/ Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":229057,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2026\/03\/30\/shutterstock_brainwashing_warning.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[24,27],"class_list":["post-229056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-cybersecurity","tag-vulnerability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229058,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229056\/revisions\/229058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}