73% of Businesses Have End-of-Life Devices on Their Networks

Data polled from 350 different organizations found that 73 percent of businesses have “end-of-support” devices on their networks. American managed services provider Softchoice used an assessment service to check the health of the organizations’ network infrastructure, examining 212,000 Cisco networking devices.

End-of-support devices are critically at risk because they are no longer issued updates and patches for found vulnerabilities. Which means the businesses using them will be open to attackers who can exploit any known vulnerabilities.

“We found the overall number of at-risk network devices is on the decline, however, the number of businesses who have them in their networks is actually on the rise,” said David Vigna, Cisco practice director at Softchoice. “The misconception is that fewer at-risk devices make an organization less vulnerable, but it only takes one to bring down an entire network.”

Softchoice’s sample may be on the smaller side, but the findings gel with Cisco’s midyear cybersecurity report, which also found that a large majority of organizations are using old devices, or devices that have outdated security updates.

In 2015 Cisco’s researchers examined 115,000 Cisco devices and found that 92 percent (106,000) had known vulnerabilities in their software. For the 2016 midyear report, Cisco looked at more than 103,000 devices and found, on average, all of them had 28 known vulnerabilities. Of those, more than 23 percent of them were an average of 5.6 years old. And nearly 10 percent of the vulnerabilities were older than 10 years.