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Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
424 points (99.8% liked)
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It's the US. Anyone surprised?
Well no, they tend to copy a lot from China these days.
except badly.
First as a tragedy, then as a farce.
With our current dotard leadership it's surprising they haven't banned routers completely.
At least one person probably
What happened to small government?
I live in probably one of the reddest states, and it's always been hypocrisy. Republicans are lying out of their lower lie holes every fucking time they open their mouths.
Every single Republican politician and voter is a purely evil person.
Politician, sure. But people are easily duped, especially when they're uneducated. That doesn't make them evil, especially when there's a multi-billion dollar disinformation network constantly trying to mislead them.
At what point does ignorance cross into willful ignorance? And at what point does willful ignorance become malicious? It’s a blurry line, to be sure.
Very true. Thank you for helping to ground me.
And thank you both for reminding me why I like this place.
I dont know if I'd say evil but they're definitely uninformed and ignorant.
They've been fed nothing but lies and propaganda and taught that the other side is evil, and if they're religious it's exactly the same as being in a full on cult with no bearing on reality.
Sure, some of us like myself were smart enough to realize its a massive grift . not everyone has the brainpower.
Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.
There are routers made in US?
According to the BBC, the one exception is the newer Starlink Wi-Fi router, which the company says is manufactured in Texas.
This is exasperating.
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista are US companies. The actual manufacturing is doubtlessly somewhere in Asia though.
No. Which is the point. Everything has to be approved manually with no specific criteria so they can arbitrarily make the decisions they want.
And in the trump economy, that includes paying a hefty bribe for approval
This affects firmware too. Not just the hardware.
There is an exemption for products that the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security have granted "Conditional Approval" after finding these devices do not pose such unacceptable risks. Router makers can apply to the FCC to get on the approved list.
Wow, what an insane coincidence it's exactly those two departments and no one else. Golly, I wonder why. (Edit: To clarify, if you're going to do this stupid, posturing bullshit, I "get" the DoD because of the NSA, and DHS has CISA. Just really no one else? Seems like consolidating more control.)
Any word on what the fee for that application will be?
I mean... supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.
If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.
And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain't gonna complain.
I do care about cybersecurity, but I'm well past a point with the Trump administration where it's possible to take even the few good-sounding things coming out of it at face value. I don't believe for a second Trump or anyone in his cabinet values cybersecurity over: jingoistic "Made in America" posturing to his audience, enforcing a monopoly on spying on US citizens, giving as much power as possible to the two departments he's most heavily and illegally abusing, and using this as more "trade war" bullshit where multinational corporations can personally bribe him to get whitelisted.
I might celebrate this if we had a POTUS who hadn't demonstrated over and over for a decade that everything they do is a ploy to turn the US into a kleptofascist hellscape.
I agree with you; your concerns are rational. I don't think you or I share them with the Trump administration.
Cisco is such a joke
They are the defacto bones of the Internet purely for their legacy. The company is so glut with inefficiency.
Welp, so much for OpenWRT on cheap devices designed for routing (even though flashing the firmware to install it probably got rid of any backdoors anyway); now we'll have to resort to OPNSense on overkill PC hardware.
Came here to say... US (and everyone else) would be way more secure if it mandated routers use OpenWRT and funded a few red/blue security engineers to work on it full time
almost like its not about security
There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers and updating their firmware to deploy espionage tools.
It's not hypocrisy to try to spy on others while preventing them from spying on you.