Day 14: take out the trash
The short answer
Equipment past its end-of-life date stops getting security updates. List your devices with make, model and serial number, look up each end-of-life or end-of-support date, and plan replacements. While you’re there, check that everything is patched.
If you are new to the series please start with Day 1. If not, welcome back! Today we are hunting for old equipment aka “End Of Life Equipment”… if you have a completely ‘virtual’ company and your employees just have laptops and work from home…congrats you can take the day off, assuming the laptops are young enough to run windows 10 (soon to be 11). If you aren’t in that camp and have an office, server room, network closet, or VOIP phone system you should take a moment to take stock of everything you have.
Record relevant data such as its make, model, serial number etc. in a spreadsheet…your tax accountant may thank you and you can use this to track the dreaded “End of Life” date for your digital equipment. To find this date google is your friend. You should be able to use the make and model plus the term “end of life” or “end of support” to find it. When your equipment passes this date it usually means you can no longer get support or critical security updates. This means even if you are following the recommendations I laid out around patching your systems, you will be out of luck. Therefore, make a plan to replace your “dead” equipment as soon as possible and make a plan to replace your other equipment by the “end of life” date moving forward. When you do replace equipment, consider wiping it or shredding it as it may have sensitive information in its logs.
Bonus: take this moment to make sure all of the equipment you listed is part of your patching strategy. Is the firmware up to date?
As always, if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out and Happy Hunting!
