Legacy Systems
A legacy system is one that is no longer directly supported by its vendor.
- might be because:
- vendor has gone out of business
- or formally deprecated use of the product
- product that is no longer supported is referred to as end of life (EOL)
- Networks often need to retain hosts running legacy OSs and applications software or old-style mainframe computers to run services that are too complex or expensive to migrate to a more modern platform
- Legacy systems usually work well for what they do
- is why they don’t get prioritized for replacement
- but they represent severe risks in terms of security vulnerabilities
- If attackers discover faulty code that they can use to try to exploit the device, the vendor will not be available to develop a software patch to block the exploit
- important to isolate them as far as possible from the rest of the network and to ensure that any network channels linking them are carefully protected and monitored