Still running that decade-old server, router, or POS terminal?

Fraudsters are counting on it.

Here's how attackers exploit aging tech:

🔑 Default configs that never changed - Factory passwords, open ports, forgotten services. Attackers don't brute-force when "admin/admin" still works. Breach data shows "admin" appeared 53 million times as a password.

🔐 Weak crypto and obsolete protocols - SHA-1, old TLS, insecure key storage. Legacy POS systems often store encryption keys in plain text. Intercepting credentials has become a math problem that attackers solved years ago.

🧱 Unpatchable by design - Hardware past its supported lifespan can't run modern updates. Known vulnerabilities stay open forever. Research shows unsupported systems are 4x more likely to be weaponized^[ref].

🧠 Blind spots in monitoring - Legacy devices rarely integrate with modern SIEM or fraud platforms. If you can't see it, you can't flag it.

🔄 Perfect pivot points - Compromised old hardware becomes internal infrastructure for proxying fraud traffic, manipulating transactions, or tampering with data before detection.

Here's a stat that should keep IT and fraud teams up at night: vulnerability exploitation as a breach entry point rose another 34% in 2025, now accounting for 20% of all breaches according to Verizon's latest DBIR^[ref]. Even worse? Only 54% of edge device vulnerabilities were fully remediated last year - and those that were took a median of 32 days to patch. That's a month of open doors.

Old hardware isn't just "legacy." It's predictable, unpatched, and quietly trusted. That router from 2012? Still running strong. So is the CVE from 2012 that attackers used to get in.

💡What to do about it?

- Start by treating hardware age as a fraud risk indicator, not just an IT lifecycle issue.

- Inventory what's actually in production, not what's on paper.

- Isolate or segment legacy devices aggressively.

- Compensate with stronger monitoring, behavioral controls, and transaction-level anomaly detection.

- And if replacement isn't possible yet, assume compromise and design controls accordingly.

Old hardware doesn't fail loudly. It fails quietly. And fraud loves quiet systems.