With the Rise of AI, Cisco Sounds an Urgent Alarm About the Risks of Aging Tech

"Aging digital infrastructure equipment like routers, network switches, and network-attached storage-has long posed a silent risk to organizations. In the short term, it's cheaper and easier to just leave those boxes running in a forgotten closet. But this infrastructure may have old, insecure configurations, and legacy tech is often no longer supported by vendors for software patches and other protections."

"Dubbed "Resilient Infrastructure," the initiative includes research and industry outreach as well as technical shifts in how Cisco manages its own legacy products. The company says that it is launching new warnings for its products that are approaching end of life, so if customers are running known insecure configurations or attempt to add them, they will receive a clear and explicit prompt when they update a device."

""Infrastructure globally is aging, and that creates a ton of risk," says Anthony Grieco, Cisco's chief security and trust officer. "The thing we've got to get across is this aging infrastructure wasn't designed for today's threat environments. And by not updating it, it's fostering opportunities for adversaries." Research conducted for Cisco by the British advisory firm WPI Strategy looked at the prevalence and impact of end-of-life technology in the "critical national infrastructure" of five countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan."

Aging routers, network switches, and network-attached storage often remain in service with insecure configurations and without vendor support for patches. Legacy infrastructure can harbor vulnerabilities that attackers exploit more easily as generative AI accelerates discovery and weaponization of flaws. Cisco has launched the Resilient Infrastructure initiative combining research, industry outreach, and technical changes to product management. Cisco will add clear warnings for products nearing end of life and prompt customers when known insecure configurations are present. Cisco plans to remove historic settings and interoperability options deemed unsafe. Independent research identified elevated end-of-life risk in the UK and the US.

Read at WIRED