This should not be a revelation though. Granted, back when the Internet wasn&#x27;t so popular, the risk for people like you and me, or for small companies, was relatively low. Partly because the value of Internet-accessible information was relatively low, too -- twenty years ago, if I bought a  backdoored home router, all the Evil Guys would get access to would be really bad code snippets and a few folders of porn pics.<p>But the fact that people with access to your infrastructure also had access to your data was more or less well known ever since &quot;the beginning&quot;, and it&#x27;s also why internetworks other than the Internet <i>were</i> a thing for a long time.<p>&gt; And yet, as a whole, we de facto continue to trust in opaque entities that provide valuable yet likely compromised services because it is convenient.<p>Don&#x27;t forget the scarcity of alternatives though. It takes a lot of money to come up with a credible alternative to Juniper and Cisco. <i>Siphoning</i> personal data is what sells nowadays, not protecting it.