26 November 2025

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

Lily Hay Newman

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. As generative AI platforms make it easier for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in targets' systems, the network tech company Cisco is launching an effort to raise awareness about the issue and promote improvements—both for ancient Cisco devices and products from other companies that are still in use.

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. Eventually, Cisco will go a step further to completely remove historic settings and interoperability options that are no longer considered safe.

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