Cisco IOS/IOS-XE routers and switches will complain that you haven't licensed them correctly, but it doesn't impact functionality.
Cisco shot both it's feet years ago with an unpopular "SMART Licensing" scheme. One of my proudest moments as a net tech was the shocked silence when I told a room of Cisco employees that we weren't upgrading our 3850s past 16.6 (or something) because we refused to deal with their SMART licensing. They came up with a solution and we ended up upgrading (there was a feature in a later version that we wanted).
In the past, there were different software images for different feature sets. If you could get ahold of an image you didn't pay for, it would just work and you'd have functionality that wasn't licensed.
In the really distant past, this worked but not well because you'd need specialized hardware for things like fast encryption for VPN. So, if you didn't pay for the securityk9 license and used the 2811 without a VPN module, it would work but not well.
Anyways, I'm not aware of Cisco having any ability to brick customer equipment. I read this article as saying they destroyed their own property in branches and warehouses within the Russian Federation.
You're right, but you might be disappointed in how seldom network operators actually install updates. It isn't uncommon to find switches with a year of uptime still running the factory software that came preinstalled. (I'm obviously not trying to defend this malpractice!)
You can easily find firmwares for older EOL systems. Cisco isn't even gonna fight that. Readily available on the Bay of Yarrrrrrr
Newer firmwares for Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, et al, are a little harder but still easy to find.
In both cases caveat emptor, since you have no way of knowing if they're trustworthy or not. I messed around with some older yarrrrrr firmware when I was studying for my CCNP and built a lap from craigslist hardware, but that was behind a pfsense firewall I built myself and kept totally away from anything that mattered. No malicious behavior AFAIK, but I'd never trust those IOS/IOS-NX images in Prod.
Well, Cisco publishes both MD5 and SHA-512 hashes for all their updates. It would be pretty impressive for a bad guy to build an evil file that has both an MD5 and also SHA-512 collision. You might need an active CCO account to view http://software.cisco.com, though.
Cisco IOS/IOS-XE routers and switches will complain that you haven't licensed them correctly, but it doesn't impact functionality.
Cisco shot both it's feet years ago with an unpopular "SMART Licensing" scheme. One of my proudest moments as a net tech was the shocked silence when I told a room of Cisco employees that we weren't upgrading our 3850s past 16.6 (or something) because we refused to deal with their SMART licensing. They came up with a solution and we ended up upgrading (there was a feature in a later version that we wanted).
In the past, there were different software images for different feature sets. If you could get ahold of an image you didn't pay for, it would just work and you'd have functionality that wasn't licensed.
In the really distant past, this worked but not well because you'd need specialized hardware for things like fast encryption for VPN. So, if you didn't pay for the securityk9 license and used the 2811 without a VPN module, it would work but not well.
Anyways, I'm not aware of Cisco having any ability to brick customer equipment. I read this article as saying they destroyed their own property in branches and warehouses within the Russian Federation.