On July 29, 2011, Cisco announced the end of life of the product. No further product updates were released after July 30, 2012, and support ceased on July 29, 2014.[4] The Support page with documentation links was taken down on July 30, 2016, replaced with an Obsolete Status Notification.[5]
It was succeeded by Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client.
Availability
The software is not free but is often installed on university and business computers in accordance with a site-license. As with most corporate licenses, administrators are allowed to freely distribute the software to users within their network.
The open-source vpnc client can connect to most VPNs supported by the official client.
Compatibility
VPN Client 4.9.01.0230 beta added support for Mac OS X 10.6.[6] Stable version 4.9.01.0180 appears to lack that support; 4.9.00.0050 explicitly did not support versions of Mac OS X later than 10.5.[7]
VPN Client 5.0.07.0290 added support for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.[8][9]
Security
The client uses profile configuration files (.pcf) that store VPN passwords either hashed with type 7, or stored as plaintext. A vulnerability has been identified,[10] and those passwords can easily be decoded using software or online services.[11] To work around these issues, network administrators are advised to use the Mutual Group Authentication feature, or use unique passwords (that aren't related to other important network passwords).[10]
