Is Your Router Too Old to Be Safe? End-of-Life Routers Explained

Your router might be eight years old. It still hands out wifi, the lights still blink, and nothing seems wrong. Here's the uncomfortable part. In May 2025 the FBI put out a warning naming routers just like it.

Criminals aren't hunting the newest routers. They're hunting the oldest ones, because old routers have stopped fighting back. The industry term for this is end of life, or EOL. Once your model crosses that line, the manufacturer will never fix another security hole in it.

What end of life actually means

Every router runs firmware, the built-in software that controls the whole device. While a model is supported, the manufacturer patches that firmware when researchers find holes. Then, after some years, support ends. The model is declared end of life, and the patches stop for good.

This is different from simply having an outdated router. On a supported model, you can update your firmware and close every known hole in a few minutes. On an EOL model, there's nothing left to install. The firmware it has today is the firmware it dies with.

That's why an EOL router gets more dangerous over time, not less. Researchers and criminals keep finding new flaws in old models. The fixes never arrive. The gap between what's known and what's patched only widens.

Support windows vary a lot by brand. Some budget models get patched for only a few years. Flagship models often do better, but nothing lasts forever, and vendors rarely announce the cutoff loudly.

Why criminals specifically hunt EOL routers

Routers make lovely targets. They sit on the open internet around the clock, they run no antivirus, and nobody watches them. An old router adds the best part for an attacker: known holes that will never close.

The FBI's May 2025 FLASH bulletin described exactly how this gets turned into money. Attackers were compromising end-of-life routers that had remote administration switched on. They infected them with a new variant of TheMoon malware. Then they rented the routers out through two criminal proxy services called 5Socks and Anyproxy.

A proxy sounds abstract, so here's the plain version. Criminals push their traffic through your router so it looks like it came from your home. Fraud, password attacks, scans for new victims, all wearing your address. You pay the power bill while someone else rents out your connection.

The FBI named the models it kept seeing. The list is heavy with older Linksys gear: the E1200, E2500, E1000, E4200, E1500, E300, E3200 and E1550, plus older Cisco-branded devices. If one of those is running your home, plan its retirement now. Until the replacement arrives, use our Linksys router login guide to get into the admin panel and switch off remote access.

Two botnets from 2026 show it's getting worse

The FBI warning wasn't a one-off scare. In June 2026, researchers disclosed a botnet called AryStinger. It had infected more than 4,300 devices, mostly end-of-life D-Link DIR-850L and DIR-818LW routers, plus some D-Link network storage boxes.

The ages of the holes are the alarming part. AryStinger exploits flaws up to thirteen years old, including CVE-2013-3307 and CVE-2016-5681, alongside the newer CVE-2025-11837. A bug from 2013 still works in 2026 because those routers stopped receiving patches years ago.

Each infected router becomes what researchers call an Executor node. It scans for new victims, relays traffic, opens tunnels, and runs whatever commands the operators send. Nearly half the infections sat in South Korea. Most of the rest were in China, with smaller pockets in Sweden, Malaysia and Singapore.

Asus owners don't get a pass either. Since May 2026, the RondoDox botnet has been exploiting CVE-2018-5999 in older AsusWRT firmware. That's an eight-year-old bug doing fresh damage on routers nobody updated or replaced.

How to check if your router is end of life

You don't need special tools for this check. You need the model number and about five minutes.

1. Flip the router over and find the sticker. Look for the word Model followed by letters and numbers, like DIR-850L or E2500.
2. Note the hardware version printed nearby on the same label. Some models went EOL in one hardware version before another.
3. Search for your brand's end-of-support page. Linksys, D-Link and Netgear all publish public lists of models they no longer support.
4. Find your exact model and hardware version on that list. If it appears there, it will never receive another update.

If your model isn't listed, check the date of its last firmware release on the support page. A router that hasn't seen an update in three or four years is drifting the same way. Vendors won't email you when support ends. The router just quietly stops being defended.

If your ISP supplied the router, ask them directly whether it still gets updates. ISP gateways go end of life too. Plenty of them stay in service far longer than the manufacturer ever intended.

What to do if your router is EOL

The FBI and CISA give the same first answer: replace it with a supported model. That's annoying advice, and new routers cost real money. It's still the only fix that actually closes the hole.

If you can't replace it this month, shrink the target in three moves. First, install the very last firmware the manufacturer released, even if it's years old. Second, change the admin password, because attackers try everything on our default router passwords list before anything clever. Third, turn off remote management, which was the common thread in the FBI's TheMoon cases.

Those steps shrink the risk. They don't remove it. Any new flaw discovered next month will still hit your device, with no patch coming. Treat the hardened setup as a bridge to replacement, not a destination.

Worried the router might already be infected? The signs are subtle, and we've covered them in our guide to telling if your router has been hacked. A factory reset plus the hardening steps above clears most infections on the spot.

Can you still reuse the old box?

We have a guide on turning an old router into a wifi extender, and it's a great trick for hardware that still gets updates. An EOL router is a shakier candidate. It would keep running the same unpatched code inside your network.

There's a middle ground worth considering. An EOL router used purely as a wired switch, behind a supported router and with remote access off, is a much smaller target. Anything on the FBI's list should still be retired completely. When you do let a router go, recycle it through an electronics program rather than the bin.

A simple rule for router age

Treat five years as the point where you start asking questions. Check your model against the vendor's end-of-support page once a year after that. Start budgeting for a replacement around year seven, even if everything still works. Wifi standards will have moved on by then, so you'll feel the upgrade anyway.

When you do buy, check the support commitment before the speed numbers. Some vendors now say up front how long a model will receive updates. A long support promise is worth more than a slightly faster chip without one.

Routers are appliances with expiry dates. Nobody prints the date on the box. It lives on the vendor's support page, and now you know exactly where to look.