SonicWall Solutions Massive Epic Fail

Sans is reporting that they are receiving loads of complaints that SonicWall’s integrated solutions-  Email Security Gateway, Firewalls, Content Filters, Intrusion Prevention and Antivirus- have all stopped working for all of their customers all at once.

This is apparently due to a crash in SonicWall’s lincense manager server.  Apparently, all of Sonicwall’s products check in with this server to verify that the system is allowed to run prior to doing its job.  And without that server, all features of SonicWall’s products fail.  At least they fail “open” in that it allows traffic to pass, but then again, they fail open, allowing spam, viruses, web attacks and unauthorized content to pass too.

It would seem to me that a security company would know to keep such a critical system in a high-availability mode so a failure in the server would still allow its customers to use the products.  SonicWall’s customers are hurting and flooding the customer support lines and the calls are just rolling over to voicemail.

Now hackers know how to take down SonicWall customers-  Simply DDoS the license manager and walk into the enterprise of your choice.