End of Life (EOL) Equipment should not mean End of Life (Your Life)

This I Am The Cavalry panel, with Stacey Higginbotham, Silas Cutler and Paul Roberts, looks at equipment that has reached end of support but stays connected and in service. The opening frames the problem with consumer data on smart devices that owners never learn are unsupported, and with home and small office routers that number in the tens of millions and often carry known flaws. The speakers tie these devices to state-linked intrusion campaigns and to botnets that use them as relay infrastructure.

The middle of the talk moves from the home into enterprise and operational technology. It describes a botnet built on end-of-life routers and cameras, and how a takedown can still leave devices exposed to reinfection. It also covers a vendor VPN appliance whose firmware was found to run an unsupported operating system, an old Linux kernel and outdated libraries carrying many known vulnerabilities. Industrial operators, by contrast, typically plan for obsolescence over decades, and the speakers suggest that planning habit could carry over to other sectors.

The closing section turns to policy and practice. Proposals include minimum support periods printed on product labels, advance notice before support ends, software bills of materials, and graceful handoffs such as escrow or open-sourcing. For practitioners, the talk recommends inventorying devices, writing an end-of-life plan, rehearsing offline operations, and asking whether a product can run software other than the vendor's own.