Cyber Eagle Weekly
Cyber Eagle Project
The rapid deployment solution for increasing and maintaining cyber resilience in critical infrastructure
Critical Infrastructure in the Crosshairs: When AI Meets 20-Year-Old Routers
If you’re responsible for anything that keeps the lights on, planes flying, water flowing or markets trading, this week’s development should hit you like a cold shock: attackers are no longer hunting just for zero-days — they’re hunting for your oldest, most “stable,” most forgotten hardware.
Last week, Cisco quietly confirmed that nation-state actors and advanced ransomware crews are now systematically compromising end-of-support routers, switches, and firewall appliances that operators assumed were “too critical to touch” or “safely isolated.” Add generative AI to the mix, and what once took elite red teams weeks can now be replicated by a script in minutes.
1 | Your “Stable” Legacy Gear Just Became the Front Door
Every organisation has that rack nobody wants to disturb — the router from 2010, the remote-site firewall the vendor stopped supporting in 2018, the switch running firmware so old no one remembers the password reset procedure.
Those systems aren’t legacy. They’re invitations.
Cisco’s telemetry shows these out-of-support devices are now the #1 initial access vector in high-end attacks against critical infrastructure — not because the vulnerabilities are exotic, but because the devices simply cannot be patched anymore.
A compromised 12-year-old router doesn’t just expose an office network. It exposes flat OT networks, remote-maintenance paths, control-plane management, and SCADA access routes. One foothold becomes “lights out.”
The message for infrastructure leaders: technical debt is now a national-security liability.
2 | AI Is Pouring Gasoline on the Fire
Attackers aren’t guessing anymore — they’re automating.
Generative AI is now being used to:
What used to be opportunistic probing is now systematic, scalable compromise.
For critical infrastructure, where machine-to-machine trust and service identities are everywhere, this shift is catastrophic. Network perimeters are no longer your primary risk — identity, supply chain, and device obsolescence are the new battleground.
Zero-trust and continuous verification aren’t theoretical frameworks anymore. They’re survival mechanisms.
3 | This Isn’t an IT Problem Anymore — It’s a Fiduciary One
Boards that once viewed “tech refresh” as a budget nuisance are now staring down:
This is now a risk-governance issue, not a procurement debate.
Ransomware crews know it. Nation-states know it. Regulators know it.
The clock has run out on “we’ll replace it next year.”
What Resilient Operators Are Doing Right Now
Ask any operator who has done this: hearts stop when red teams compromise “air-gapped” control-system paths in under 45 minutes.
Making This Practical
At Cyber Eagle Project, we’ve taken Fortune 500 operators and two national grids from “we’ll get to it someday” to a defensible, auditable, regulator-ready roadmap within 90 days.
If any of the above feels uncomfortably close to home, reply here — or book 30 minutes directly. No slides. No sales script. Just clarity on where your real exposure is, and what it will take to fix it.
Because the attackers already know which router in your estate is still running IOS 12.2(55)SE. The only question is whether you find it first.