E-waste is greatly exacerbated by low level backdoors. Gear cannot be
repurposed if you cannot trust the hardware or embedded firmware. A
skip full of Cisco routers [1] was sitting outside an organisation
once, and I asked about their fate. "Can't you just wipe the OS and
install something open source?", I asked. "Would you trust the
hardware?" they replied.
Unbelievably Cisco are still in business and actually produce
educational cyber-security materials.
"Would you trust the hardware?" is a typical attitude towards End-Of-Life equipment that is more susceptible to failure due to age e.g. organizational IT refresh cycles.
Was there any further indication that the comment was about a backdoor-type vulnerability?
Unbelievably Cisco are still in business and actually produce educational cyber-security materials.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/backdoors_in_...