Networks Left Unprotected After SonicWall Server Glitch
January 9, 2009 by AntivirusWare.SonicWall’s subscription-based security software went dark for customers for several hours on December 2 as SonicWall’s licensing server had an outage. Customers received an email that told them the company’s monitoring systems had indicated that the protection may have been affected and may have caused the product license key to be reset. It was a temporary outage and full service resumed within a few hours. It was unclear exactly how long the server was down and how many customers were affected by it.
Products affected included SonicWall UTM Firewall Appliances-PRO series, TZ series and NSA series; all SonicWall Email Security Appliances and Email Security software; SonicWall Content Security Manager Appliances; all Continuous Data Protection Appliances; and SGMS managed appliances.
According to a company spokesperson, although the automatic validation had stopped, customers could still download updates and resynchronize licenses manually through the company’s support website.
Affected customers can also go to the website and see if there is anything they need to do in order to resynchronize their license codes.
Security companies that had been relying on SonicWall were unpleasantly surprised to find that the devices would stop functioning when SonicWall’s validation servers went offline.
Most customers see this as a serious security flaw that could potentially compromise the security of anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of networks. More than one customer was left bewildered by the fact that the operation of vital services was tied to a server used for validating licenses.