Also: Your home Wi-Fi isn't nearly as private as it should be - 6 free ways to lock it down

In one recent incident, the US Department of Justice and the FBI disrupted a network of compromised SOHO routers that the Russian GRU (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate) had exploited to carry out malicious DNS hijacking operations. As Russia's military-based spy agency, the GRU is infamous for committing acts of espionage and more violent types of attacks against foreign adversaries.

In its warnings, the FBI and NSA announced that members of the GRU cybercrime group APT28 (aka Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard) have been stealing login credentials from compromised routers, including older, legacy TP-Link routers. In its own advisory for the CVE-2023-50224 vulnerability, TP-Link said that many of its products are affected, but that all of them have reached end-of-life status, which means they are no longer supported by the company.

The US government has already been weighing a ban of TP-Link routers, charging that the devices are vulnerable to security threats and are tied to China as the manufacturer's country of origin. The company has fought back against these charges, arguing that China has no control over its products and that all the core data security functions are handled within the US.