A year to replace end-of-support firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways

America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems.

CISA has issued a Binding Operational Directive that orders federal civilian executive branch agencies to inventory and replace "end-of-support" edge devices – hardware and software that vendors no longer patch or maintain – in a bid to close one of government IT's most persistent intrusion paths.

The directive, published this week, requires agencies to immediately update still-supported equipment and, within three months, produce a comprehensive inventory of edge devices to identify those past vendor support deadlines. Anything that's fallen off the vendor support cliff has to be booted off government networks and replaced with kit that still gets security fixes. Agencies have about a year to finish the hardware spring clean, and two years to put tracking in place so ...