Your Router Is Older Than Your Last Three Phones

Quick question. When did you buy your router?

If you had to think about it, that’s already a problem. Most small offices I walk into have a router sitting on a shelf behind the front desk, covered in dust, blinking away like it has since the day the internet company installed it. Nobody logs into it. Nobody updates it. It just works, so nobody thinks about it.

Here’s the thing. That box is the front door to every computer, printer, card reader and camera in your building. And if it’s more than five or six years old, there’s a good chance the company that made it stopped fixing security holes a long time ago.

What end of life actually means

Every router runs software, called firmware. When researchers find a hole in that software, the manufacturer puts out an update. That’s the deal, as long as the product is supported.

Once a model hits end of life, the deal is over. The manufacturer stops releasing patches. New holes still get discovered, they just never get fixed. They get published, though, and attackers read the same security bulletins your IT person does.

This isn’t a theory. In 2025 the FBI put out a public warning about criminals taking over old, unsupported routers and renting them out as proxies. That means someone else’s traffic, including fraud and attacks, runs through your internet connection. The router owner usually has no idea. The internet still works fine, so nothing seems wrong.

What an attacker can do with your router

Watch or redirect traffic going in and out of your office
Send your staff to fake login pages for your bank or Microsoft 365
Use your connection to attack other people, with your IP address on the logs
Get a foothold to poke at every other device on your network

That last one is what keeps me up at night. The router is the one device that can see everything.

How to check yours in 10 minutes

You don’t need to be technical for this part. Grab a flashlight and go look at the thing.

Step 1: Get the model number

Flip it over. There’s a sticker with the brand and model number. Take a picture of it with your phone.

Step 2: Search for the support page

Search the brand, the model and the words end of life. Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, ASUS and most others keep lists of retired models. If yours shows up, you have your answer.

Step 3: Check the last firmware date

If it’s not on an end of life list, look at the downloads page for your model. If the newest firmware is more than two years old, treat it like it’s retired. The company may not have said so officially, but they’ve clearly moved on.

Step 4: Find out who actually owns it

Is it your router, or the one Comcast or AT&T gave you? Provider equipment usually updates itself, which is good. But a lot of offices have a provider box plus a second router someone plugged in years ago. That second one is usually the forgotten one.

Signs you should replace it today, not next quarter

It’s on the manufacturer’s end of life list
The admin login is still the default, or printed on the sticker
Remote management from the internet is turned on and nobody remembers why
It only supports older Wi-Fi security like WPA or WEP
Nobody in the office knows the admin password

If you hit two or more of those, stop reading and put it on your list for this week.

What to buy instead

You don’t need a $3,000 enterprise firewall to run a 10-person office. You do need something that’s still getting updates and that someone is responsible for.

For most small businesses I’d look for a business-grade router or firewall from a vendor that publishes a clear support timeline. Ubiquiti, Fortinet, Netgate and similar brands all have options in the few hundred dollar range. The brand matters less than two things: it gets automatic security updates, and it lets you separate guest Wi-Fi from your office network.

When you set it up:

Change the admin password to something long and store it in your password manager
Turn on automatic firmware updates
Turn off remote admin from the internet unless you truly need it
Turn off UPnP, which lets devices open holes in your firewall on their own
Put a reminder on your calendar to check the support status once a year

What this means for you

A router is boring. That’s exactly why it gets ignored, and exactly why attackers like it. It doesn’t crash. It doesn’t pop up warnings. It just quietly keeps doing whatever it’s told, including by people who aren’t you.

The fix is cheap compared to almost anything else in security. One afternoon, a few hundred bucks, and your front door actually locks again.

So go flip it over. Look at the sticker. If you’re not sure what you’re looking at, reach out through yourtech.solutions and I’ll help you make sense of it. Always happy to troubleshoot.