> these routers are secure.
Owner of a C7 v4 here. There has not been a firmware update from TP-Link since December 2019 (note that v4 is the second-most recent HW revision). No way these are not affected by at least some CVE somewhere in their stack. Calling them secure is a leap of faith that TP-Link does not deserve.
I recently flashed openwrt exactly to be able to be on a more recent stack.
I would never dream exposing that UI to the Internet as-is. They don't even have any form of brute forcing protection. If they really needed access to the router remotely, it would be much saner to expose an SSH server with pubkey-only access or VPN, both with brute forcing protection, and allow tunnelling to the router UI only from the LAN side.
Either who set those up really has nothing to lose if they get owned, or they do not know what they are doing. In both cases, it does not qualify as being a secure setup. (Sure, they may also be honeypots - in which case your argument was incorrect anyway, as they are secure, but they are not routers)
Owner of a C7 v4 here. There has not been a firmware update from TP-Link since December 2019 (note that v4 is the second-most recent HW revision). No way these are not affected by at least some CVE somewhere in their stack. Calling them secure is a leap of faith that TP-Link does not deserve.
I recently flashed openwrt exactly to be able to be on a more recent stack.
I would never dream exposing that UI to the Internet as-is. They don't even have any form of brute forcing protection. If they really needed access to the router remotely, it would be much saner to expose an SSH server with pubkey-only access or VPN, both with brute forcing protection, and allow tunnelling to the router UI only from the LAN side.
Either who set those up really has nothing to lose if they get owned, or they do not know what they are doing. In both cases, it does not qualify as being a secure setup. (Sure, they may also be honeypots - in which case your argument was incorrect anyway, as they are secure, but they are not routers)