Brian Greenberg 
We spent a decade obsessing over shiny new AI tools while mostly ignoring the creaky hardware humming away in forgotten closets. Now, AI is efficient enough that attackers can direct it at those aging routers, switches, and storage arrays and let it chew through well-known bugs at scale. The more automated offense becomes, the more brutally obvious it is when you are still defending with unpatched, end-of-life infrastructure.
Cisco is essentially standing up and saying the quiet part out loud: legacy infrastructure is not just old, it is misaligned with the threat environment you actually live in. Their new "Resilient Infrastructure" push is interesting not because it sells new boxes, but because it treats infrastructure risk as something executives and boards should see as clearly as cloud spend. Warnings on insecure configurations and eventually stripping out unsafe legacy settings are one way of nudging customers to admit that "do nothing" has always been the most expensive option, just on a delay.
For CIOs and CISOs, this is a governance problem disguised as a hardware problem. You cannot talk seriously about AI security and then quietly run your critical workloads on devices that no longer get patches and still expose obsolete features for the sake of convenience. The right mindset is simple: assume AI is already helping attackers find the low-hanging fruit, then make sure your estate is not the orchard.
TL;DR
🧠 Aging routers and switches are now easy AI targets
⚡ Generative AI accelerates the discovery of known vulnerabilities
🎓 Upgrading and decommissioning legacy gear is cheaper than repeated incidents
🔍 Treat end-of-life infrastructure as a board-level cyber risk, not just an IT housekeeping task
https://www.wired.com/story/cisco-aging-technical-infrastructure/
#CyberSecurity #Cisco #Infrastructure #AI #security #privacy #cloud #infosec
grawity