Asus says it's confident in its 'strong product security' after FCC foreign-made router ban, also *checks notes* fixes major security hole in its routers

After the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) put consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries on its Covered List earlier this week, effectively banning the sale of new models in the country without special permission, Taiwanese manufacturer Asus has been quick to respond.

An official statement released by the company yesterday says the following: "Asus has proudly served US customers since 1991, with a long-standing commitment to trusted innovation and strong product security.

"We are confident in the integrity of our supply chain and the security of our networking products. This FCC action has no impact on existing ASUS router users, software updates, and customer support."

With unfortunate timing, Asus also published a major security update for its routers on the very same day. The patch aims to mitigate against CVE-2025-15101, a particularly nasty-sounding vulnerability that scores an 8.5 out of 10 (or High severity) on the official record.

According to its listing, CVE-2025-15101 "potentially allows actions to be performed with the existing privileges of an authenticated user on the affected device, including the ability to execute system commands through unintended mechanisms".

On the one hand, you could argue that the continual discovery and patching of these flaws speaks to Asus' commitment to ongoing security. On the other, the fact that such major vulnerabilities are still cropping up on Asus routers is perhaps a little defeating of the point.

Of course, all router manufacturers experience security issues from time to time, and Asus is far from unique in this regard. Hackers managed to hijack over 16,000 TP-Link routers (and other networking devices) in 2024, creating an Azure-slamming botnet of massive proportions.

Not to mention older Cisco Linksys routers being called out by the FBI for their vulnerabilities, no less. However, Asus does seem to patch its routers more often than most, which again, could be looked at in two different ways.

Certainly, the timing of this particular fix is less than ideal. But hey, it's a good chance for me to remind you once again: Update your networking hardware, folks. It simply ain't worth the risk to ignore.