Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course.
In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government's chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More specifically, the Measuring Broadband Australia (MBA) program targeted fixed-line broadband services provided over the NBN, Australia's government-owned wholesale open-access broadband network, as well as services delivered over other access networks.)
According to the final report that the ACCC distributed, the routers are whiteboxes that were “supplied by SamKnows” and that “perform tests to measure internet performance using test servers maintained by SamKnows and hosted in Australia.”
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International authorities and a raft of private technology companies say they have disrupted a cybercrime “assembly line” that allowed crooks to collect millions of login credentials and steal more than $47 million in ransom payments and by other fraudulent means.
The crux of the operation was the simultaneous targeting of two unrelated tools that are widely used in various online scams. The first is Amadey, a malware-as-a-service platform for compromising devices and delivering malicious payloads for ransomware and other scams. Amadey has been observed in the wild since at least 2018 and was seen last year abusing GitHub as it collected system information from infected devices and installed customized payloads. The second tool was StealC, an infostealer-as-a-service platform that collects credentials, authentication cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, browser extensions, and files whose names match customer-defined patterns.
Amadey and StealC are separate tools that are run independently of each other. Given their widespread use, however, many customers use both in their individual cybercrime activities. The tools also, it turns out, relied on some of the same underlying infrastructure to run. Microsoft said it made this determination after analyzing the tools using AI. This insight allowed Microsoft attorneys to seek an order disrupting both at the same time.
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The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth.
The executive order, titled Securing the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computing systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition to post-quantum cryptographic key establishment schemes by December 31, 2030, and to quantum-safe digital signature schemes by December 31, 2031.
The new deadline, which for many organizations is about five years sooner than the previous one, comes on the heels of recent research showing that the resources and cost for building a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are far less than previous consensus estimates. In response, Google, Cloudflare, and other companies recently tightened their timelines for moving off vulnerable systems to 2029.
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Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, as Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose—instead, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.
But the biggest chunk of money would go to a company that likely wouldn't exist if it weren't for the government's backing. Anderon will be set up with a billion dollars each from IBM and the government and will inherit personnel and IP from IBM. It will serve as a foundry for fabricating quantum processing units and will contract its services out to IBM and any other company that wants access to cutting-edge hardware.
Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, made it clear that she is not happy with how the government is using its money to support this technology.
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The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.
Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender’s device with keys that are available only to the receiver's. By definition, E2EE means that no one else—including the platform itself—can read the plaintext messages.
In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does “not see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted” and that “Facebook systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp.” The engine for this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source code base that multiple third-party experts have said lives up to its promises.
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The American Security Robotics Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in March by Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), proposes to limit U.S. government use of Chinese ground robots including humanoids, dogs, and crawlers. The proposal came just a few days after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tightened its rules for new foreign-made routers. The two changes are part of a much broader decoupling of sensitive U.S. tech from China, which include semiconductors, port cranes, logistics data, telecom cellular base stations and network hardware, security cameras, passenger vehicles, and, in December 2025, uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) including those sold by DJI.
“I see the robots and the routers as being the latest in a long line of growing tech security concerns in the U.S. vis-à-vis Chinese technology,” says sociologist Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C, who testified on 16 April 2026 before the Congressional Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
Certain U.S. firms, such as Ghost Robotics, may benefit, because they are among the few companies that can handle demand for ground robots from U.S. government buyers. Ground robots are finished products at the top of the chain of added value, unlike semiconductors, which are “lower” down the value chain since they are always components of other products. If the proposed ground robot ban were to move lower down the value chain, preventing American robot makers from buying Chinese-made components, those companies might have a harder time fulfilling U.S. demand. The U.S. robotics industry is in a pickle: Companies would benefit from eliminating Chinese competitors at their level of the value chain, so long as they can retain their Chinese suppliers.
The U.S. does not have a serious, overarching strategy to guiding its approach to the U.S.-China techno-economic competition.” —Stephen Ezell, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
It’s still early for the ground robotics industry in the U.S. Adoption is not yet that high, nor are the supply chains mature yet. South Korea and Japan make many crucial robot components, for example, so if they or other countries the U.S. considers friendly can replace Chinese components the U.S. government declares unsafe, the U.S. robotics industry may be able to adapt and build its competitiveness.
For other technologies, it’s Chinese tech all the way down the chain. The UAS market, for example, is dominated by Chinese producers. The U.S. Department of Commerce has sought to ban them for more than a year, and in December, the FCC added UAS’s to its import ban list, called the Covered List.
“That was a problem with the drone ban,” Chan says. “Rather than thinking about how you would ramp up domestic production and then have this tapering off of dependence on Chinese drones, it was a sharp and fast switch, which left industry in the lurch.”
The FCC’s March ban on new foreign-made routers was a surprise to that industry. In 2025, the U.S. imported nearly US $ 31 billion of routers, according to the Global Electronics Association. Yet China produced only 1.1 percent of that, by value, down from around 20.5 percent of the U.S. market share in 2019. In 2025, the top three sources of routers in the U.S. by value were Vietnam, Mexico, and Thailand, together accounting for 68.4 percent of the market.
“A lot of this is more nuanced than the regulatory approaches suggest. The real vulnerabilities are outdated software, patches that haven’t been installed, unchanged default passwords,” says Global Electronics Association economist Shawn DuBravac, one of the authors of the association’s report.
On 14 April, the FCC issued conditional approvals for U.S. distribution of certain Netgear and Adtran routers, along with Sees.ai UAS’s. U.S.-headquartered Netgear manufactures routers in Vietnam and Taiwan, according to Consumer Reports. DuBravac says the fact that the FCC took only about three weeks to exempt those imports is positive, but that since the exemptions last only 18 months, manufacturers must still contend with a lot of uncertainty.
“If you’re a company you’re going to have to have clear visibility into your suppliers and into your suppliers’ suppliers,” DuBravac says. “There’s much, much more scrutiny.”
The last several U.S. administrations have restricted a growing list of Chinese tech, across both political parties. “I see this as bipartisan,” Chan says, “and I would expect continued scrutiny.”
Companies building technology subject to security controls should also prepare for speed. A White House interagency task force determined that foreign routers were a security risk, leading to the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau announcing first the UAS ban and later the router ban. Because UAS’s use radio to communicate, they are subject to FCC oversight. Both security-related determinations, unlike conventional FCC rule making, did not require public notice or a commenting period.
“There hasn’t been much of a back and forth process into [the UAS] rule,” Chan says.
The electronics industry is also accustomed to more dialogue with trade-related changes, DuBravac says. “When you see a problem, you open an investigation and stakeholders can submit input into that investigation so it feels a little more like a two-way conversation, so you’re actually hearing from industry on this.” So far, that has not happened.
Instead, even analysts that welcome U.S. security scrutiny of Chinese technology are finding the fits and starts of the associated policymaking jarring, says Stephen Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, D.C.: “The U.S. does not have a serious, overarching strategy guiding its approach to the U.S.-China techno-economic competition.”
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