You might not expect a world-renowned cyber security expert to rely on old, potentially vulnerable email software. But, for years, that’s what Mikko Hyppönen did. Shunning mainstream options such as Hotmail and Gmail, he instead chose obsolete email software called Eudora.”I used to run it years after it was out of [technical] support,” says Hyppönen, a Finnish computer security expert. He preferred Eudora for various reasons, arguing it was “really superior in many ways”. Although Eudora was far from perfectly secure, as people switched to newer email tools, Hyppönen realised that hackers were forgetting about Eudora.Hyppönen calls it “security by antiquity”. Others use the phrase “security by obsolescence” and in both cases this means relying on an older technology or system since it may prove, somewhat counterintuitively, safer than more recent alternatives.

While Hyppönen stresses that using the latest, fully patched and updated software is still “the optimum situation”, there are specific cases where older tech could be preferable from a security standpoint.”The vast majority of attackers are criminals trying to make money and it doesn’t make any sense for them to target systems being run by 50 people,” he explains.

^{Global positioning system (GPS) handsets like these in use by the Ukrainian armed forces are vulnerable to electronic jamming}.

Hyppönen isn’t alone. The Irish Aviation Authority, for instance, recently decided to keep ground-based radio navigation beacons in use because supposedly the more modern satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has proven so susceptible to jamming in recent years.”Security by antiquity” is, it turns out, a quiet way of beating cyber-criminals, hackers and enemy attackers.Matt Bishop, a computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, has tested this principle, somewhat by accident. Back in the 1990s, he and his colleagues set up a system connected to the internet and deliberately left it accessible so that they could catch hackers and bots attempting to breach it. This is a common cyber-security research technique known as a honeypot – a kind of trap set up in carefully controlled conditions.But the team picked an older software version for their honeypot that had been upgraded multiple times since its release and, consequently, no hackers bothered to target it. “When we upgraded it to the new one, we had all the attacks we wanted,” recalls Bishop. “I thought it was so amusing.”

This possibility of evading nefarious activity by sticking to old tech can take many forms. Both Bishop and Hyppönen say they have friends who refuse to get a smartphone. “One person I know [uses] a Nokia 9210,” says Hyppönen, referring to a simple, “dumb” mobile phone first released 25 years ago.

As technology has advanced, experts have often questioned whether the latest systems are actually more risky than older ones

While hackers can’t target it in quite the same way they might target a modern Android or iOS device, the phone’s operating system, Symbian, does have some old, known vulnerabilities. The flipside is that “nobody’s targeting them anymore”, adds Hyppönen. Similarly, the Nokia could be more at risk from techniques that snoop on phone calls. But how many people will bother? It’s a security trade-off.

As technology has advanced, experts have often questioned whether the latest systems are actually more risky than older ones. During the late 1990s, Bishop wrote a speech in which he argued that computers were “considerably less secure than the paper systems we still use, and that are rapidly being replaced”.Concerns about the shift from paper to digital technologies remain prevalent, especially when it comes to electronic voting systems. Some say electronic voting machines are desirable partly because they produce election results much more quickly than paper-based systems. That’s not enough to sway others, though.”Voting is the bedrock of our democracy,” says Hyppönen. “It’s one of the last things I’d like to weaken in any way, especially if the benefits are so small.”Militaries are also known for being reluctant to take chances. Even the world’s most active militaries are known to occasionally rely on old technologies for reasons of reliability and security. “One thing I’ve seen in places like Ukraine is the use of paper maps, or laminated maps, and compasses,” says Thomas Withington, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank. “You can’t jam that.” It’s a kind of “analogue resilience”, he adds.

Concerns over the vulnerability of some electronic voting systems mean many elections are still carried out with paper forms

Jamming attacks hitting GPS-based navigation have forced some countries to make careful choices about which legacy technologies to retain, and which GPS alternatives to invest in, says Victor Tasiemski, a systems engineer at Overlook Systems Technologies, which works on navigation tech.

That’s exactly what happened in Ireland, where a programme to replace ground-based radio beacons has been slowed down in order to keep those beacons operating for longer. A spokeswoman for the Irish Aviation Authority told the Irish Times in June that the beacons were being retained “as part of a planned resilience strategy”.Technologists who work with militaries are familiar with the challenge of designing systems that can link old and new technologies together. Stefan Kraus is co-founder and chief technical officer of Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, which has designed a drone-based communications platform that can connect military personnel to one another, no matter whether they are using older radios or newer ones. Military radio tech that has been around for decades is “tried, tested and secure”, he says. “The US military isn’t going away from that.”

Last Updated on August 24, 2026 by Grace Simon