Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) End of Life (EOL) Dates & Support Timeline

Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) lifecycle status — the real story

Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD, formerly Firepower Threat Defense) software trains, from Cisco's per-train End-of-Sale/End-of-Life bulletins (verified 2026-09-01). Milestone mapping follows the same convention as our Cisco ASA entry: support = End of SW Maintenance Releases, eol = End of Vulnerability/Security Support, extendedSupport = Last Date of Support. Bulletins for 6.6 and earlier predate the separate End of Vulnerability/Security Support milestone; for those trains eol mirrors End of SW Maintenance (the last date Cisco shipped fixes of any kind).

Cisco co-releases FTD and ASA trains: every overlapping milestone date here matches the corresponding ASA train (7.0↔9.16, 7.1↔9.17, 7.2↔9.18, 7.3↔9.19, 7.4↔9.20, 7.6↔9.22) — two independent Cisco bulletin sets in agreement. Cisco has already EOL-announced 7.7 (End of Vulnerability/Security Support 2027-09-29) while 7.4, 7.6, and 10.0 have no EOL bulletin yet; after 7.7 Cisco's numbering jumps to 10.0 (GA 2025-12-23).

Release dates come from the release-dates tables in Cisco's own release notes for each train. Caveat for the oldest trains: Cisco prunes deprecated builds from these tables, so the printed x.y.0 date can be a later platform-specific build rather than first GA (6.6.0's listed 2020-05-08 row is the Firepower 4112 build; 6.4.0's listed 2020-03-03 row is an FMC re-release; 6.3.0's earliest listed row is 2018-12-18). We record what Cisco currently publishes. Trains 6.2.2, 6.2.3, and 6.5 are omitted as data cycles: their EOL bulletins exist (all milestones long past — Last Dates of Support 2023-04-30, 2025-02-28, and 2023-06-30 respectively) but Cisco no longer publishes verifiable release dates for them.

KEV context: CISA files the ArcaneDoor zero-days (CVE-2024-20353, CVE-2024-20359) and CVE-2020-3452 against "Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD)" jointly — FTD shares the ASA codebase for the exploited components, so KEV pressure on ASA trains applies to the co-released FTD trains.

Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) release and support pattern

Across the 12 release lines with a published release date, Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) has shipped a new line roughly every 6 months (median interval). A line typically stays in standard support for about 3.1 years from its release to its standard-support end date (measured on the 9 lines with both dates published).

Of the 12 release lines tracked, 6 are past end of life and 6 are still within support. The newest line, 10.0, was released December 23, 2025. The next scheduled end of life is 7.2 on November 18, 2026 — 77 days from this build. The longest-supported line currently published is 7.7, to September 29, 2027. Upstream also publishes an extended-support phase for 9 lines, shown in the table above.

Computed from the tracked release data at every build — the figures above are the dates in the table, restated, not an editorial estimate.

Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) security intelligence

CISA KEV history: Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) is named in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog 1 time, most recently on 2026-08-11. Derived from CISA's live catalog at every build.

What does Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) end of life mean for your organization?

When a version of Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) reaches end of life, the maintainers stop issuing security patches. Vulnerabilities discovered after this date are publicly disclosed on the National Vulnerability Database, exploit code appears on GitHub, and your systems remain permanently exposed.

The CVE blind spot: Most vulnerability scanners check for known CVEs but do not flag the accumulation of unpatched vulnerabilities in EOL software. With a zero-day, nobody knows about the vulnerability. With EOL software, the vulnerability is public — listed, rated, and often weaponized — but no patch will ever exist. This is the most dangerous gap in enterprise security posture.

Organizations running EOL Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) should treat it as a vulnerability class in their risk register, apply compensating controls (network segmentation, enhanced monitoring, access restriction), and prioritize migration to a supported version.

Your options when Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) reaches end of life

There are four realistic paths. Which one is right depends far more on how long the system needs to keep running than on the version you are on today.

How to choose, in one question: how many more years does this system need to run? Under a year, extended support (where it exists) is usually cheaper than an emergency migration. One to three years, migrate — support purchased repeatedly costs more than doing the project once, and the project only gets harder as the version ages. Indefinitely, migrate now and plan the next migration before it surprises you.

Worth saying plainly, because vendors selling extended support rarely will: extended support is often the more expensive choice over a multi-year horizon. It is the right answer when a deadline is genuinely unreachable, not as a default. Compare the annual fee against the one-time cost of migrating before committing to either.

Formalizing decisions like this across your estate? Our free EOL policy template is a ready-to-adopt policy with risk tiers, remediation SLAs, and audit mapping — no signup, free to use and share.

Extended Support Options

If you cannot migrate immediately, extended support vendors provide continued security patches for EOL Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) versions. This is a bridge, not a permanent solution — plan your migration in parallel.

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