Last week, the US government made it official. On March 23, 2026, the FCC banned all new foreign-made consumer routers from entering the U.S. market. The trigger was three Chinese state-sponsored cyberattack campaigns representing some of the most chilling intelligence operations ever carried out on American soil. The FBI cited them. Microsoft documented them. Congress investigated them.
TP-Link - a company founded in China - controls an estimated 60% of the U.S. home router market. The majority of American homes have been running Chinese-made hardware at the center of their networks.
Here is the part that should keep you up at night: nobody knows how long this has been going on, or how deep it goes. The attacks that got documented are the ones that got caught. Volt Typhoon was only discovered after five years inside U.S. infrastructure. What hasn't been found yet is the real unknown - and in cybersecurity, the unknown is the scariest thing of all.
Volt Typhoon, run by China's People's Liberation Army, spent at least five years silently embedded inside U.S. power grids, water systems, and transportation networks without detection. It wasn't there to steal data. It was pre-positioning to cause maximum disruption at a moment of China's choosing - timed to a potential military conflict over Taiwan. It disguised its traffic by routing it through compromised American home routers.
Flax Typhoon quietly recruited hundreds of thousands of home devices - routers, cameras, storage drives - into a massive botnet. A secret army of compromised American household devices, turned into weapons and aimed back at American institutions. The owners had no idea. Their routers were blinking green while being used to attack their own country.
Salt Typhoon went straight for the wiretapping infrastructure of AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen - the systems built to comply with U.S. court-ordered surveillance. Salt Typhoon got inside them, giving China potential access to who U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring. The FBI put a $10 million bounty on those responsible. A former White House national security official called it "a counterintelligence failure of the highest order."
This is what it looks like at street level:
- Your neighbor's router gets recruited into a botnet. Their internet is now helping attack a hospital's power grid 400 miles away.
- A foreign intelligence service maps every device on your home network - your thermostat, your security camera, your kids' tablets - building a profile for future use.
- A city's water treatment system goes offline. The entry point traced back to a router two blocks away. The owner never knew.
- A lawyer, a contractor, a government employee makes a call. Salt Typhoon already had the metadata. Who they called. When. How long. Filed away.
- An entire neighborhood's devices get conscripted overnight. By morning, they're part of a coordinated attack on a US military contractor.
None of this is hypothetical. The infrastructure for all of it already existed. And those routers are still sitting in American homes right now - blinking green, looking perfectly fine.
Rio Router is not TP-Link. And our router is available right now.
The ban only blocks new, future models from receiving FCC authorization. Existing authorized inventory is unaffected. Rio Router's current model is fully authorized and on shelves today - no asterisks, no exemption applications, no waiting.
Our hardware is manufactured in Taiwan, not China. Four years ago, when we started this project, virtually every router was built in China. Our founder, John Hui, paid more to build in Taiwan because he saw exactly where this was heading. That call just got validated by the United States federal government.
John spent 40 years inside the network hardware industry - former CSO of Foxconn, CEO of eMachines and Packard Bell. Rio Router was built from the ground up with always-on VPN, Zero-Trust device isolation, and SecureRoom network segmentation. A router shouldn't just connect you to the internet. It should protect you from it.
We're not going to sugarcoat it. The United States is in an undeclared cyber war, and your home router is part of the battleground.
The attacks above used residential devices - in American homes, on American streets - as weapons against American infrastructure.
Now think about the people you know.
Your parents. Your siblings. Your best friend. Statistically, there's a 60% chance they're running a TP-Link router right now. They haven't read the FBI warnings. They just bought the cheapest option on Amazon and plugged it in. That router is the front door to everything in their home.
You just read this article. They haven't. That's the difference.
So don't just send them a link. Buy them a router ASAP.
