I read both the Kerbson & Wired articles and while I commend the work they've done, it sounds like an expensive operation and not really worth the investment by Cisco if they can't brand it or make any money from it. When I read statistics like "1.2 billion malware samples" or "11.6 petabytes of threat intelligence data" I have to wonder how much of that is really relevant today. Do we really need to be storing malware samples from archaic operating systems? Couldn't they lean down their operation to focus on the most widely used platforms? How effective are honeypots in 2020? I'm just not sure this really needs to be saved.
Corporations that built all the weak systems should take some responsibility and cough up the cash. Cisco devices are among those, as are most major manufacturers. This really doesn't need to be an America-typical "but if no one sees it why should we give anything" story. It's common sense and supporting this & similar ventures (Spamhouse?) should not need some complicated cost benefit calculation for a company making tens of billions in profit each year. If you really want one, a single headline along the lines of "Old Cisco devices vulnerable" should pay the bill sufficiently.
I think it's important. Even if they cap at 10 years of malware samples that's still petabytes of data. Also, there's something to learn now from this malware. But, maybe more importantly, there's something to learn from it in the future. How long should the Internet Archive keep old arcane internet web pages and flash sites?
