Cognitive radio network is an emerging solution to deal with spectrum scarcity and to utilize the radio spectrum in opportunistic and efficient manner. Secure data transmission is one of the important issues in these kind of networks. This work studies the secrecy outage performance of a multiple‐input multiple‐output underlay cognitive wiretap radio network system over Rayleigh fading channel with delayed channel state information. This work considers that the secondary transmitter is equipped with multiple antennas and confidential information is transmitted from to multiantenna receiver in the presence of multiantenna eavesdropper. Further, the transmit antenna selection scheme is considered at secondary transmitter to reduce the complexity of antenna selection and to make it more practicable. To improve the quality of signal, this work considers maximal ratio combining (MRC) at secondary receiver, while selection combining and MRC techniques are utilized at the eavesdropper. The closed form expression for exact, asymptotic, and intercept secrecy outage probability has been derived, and the simulation is done for the validation of analytical results. The derived results reveal deterioration of channel secrecy performance with outdated channel state information, and the eavesdropper with outdated channel state information has also an adverse effect. Moreover, the diversity order that can be achieved in underlay cognitive radio network with outdated channel state information is unity.