Why End of Life for Applications Is the Beginning of Life for Hackers

We all get older. In IT, we face problems around aging software and keeping up with patches and updates. But there is another set of dates we should equally be tracking for all our software assets: the end of life and the end of support. End of life lets our teams know when an application will no longer receive functionality updates, but these products may still get critical security patches. End of support means that there will be no more updates at all, whatever problems come up. For threat actors, these applications can be significant targets for years to come.

There are exceptions to this — for example, Microsoft released an update to Windows XP around Remote Desktop Services in 2019, fully five years after support officially ended in April 2014. This prevented any attacks similar to the WannaCry ransomware that appeared in 2017. Yet we can't rely on these updates coming through. 

To manage risk effectively, we should plan ahead around end-of-life software. In the next year, more than 35,000 applications will move to end-of-life status. 

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