14 DAY TRIAL // SonicWall, a well known vendor of firewall and other security-related appliances, announced that a licensing server outage caused the license keys in its products to be reset on Tuesday. The glitch left enterprises, organizations, and other entities unprotected from Internet threats for a significant period of time.
The company that competes on the firewall market with the likes of Cisco, Juniper and Fortinet noted that a wide range of its products were affected by the situation. They included “SonicWALL UTM Firewall Appliances-PRO series, TZ series and NSA Series Appliances, All SonicWALL Email Security Appliances and Email Security Software Installations, SonicWALL Content Security Manager Appliances, Continuous Data Protection Appliances-all and SGMS software-(managed appliances).”
Having all of these products suddenly disabled resulted in a massive wave of users complaining to the technical support lines and the forums. They expressed their anger, because spam started flowing into what should have been their secured networks, and because their security filters were not being enforced anymore. Some users were not even aware that the products used real-time licensing, and did not understand why the company didn't have a backup system in place for scenarios such as that one.
A user working for an educational institution noted that he had to resort to completely cutting the Internet access in order to prevent abuse on the network. Other customers made legal threats, because the workaround posted by the company's tech support department wasn't working. “There are slight variations between the different SonicWALL products when executing the steps to resolve this issue,” explained the company in its statement, and provided separate resolution steps for each product.
The whole incident was caused by a single licensing server, which malfunctioned and started giving erroneous responses to systems that contacted it. Jody Spoor, a senior technical support engineer at SonicWall, wrote on the company's forum that, in general, the malfunctioning of a license server should not result in reset license keys, but, for some reason, it did in that case. The company announced that it was “thoroughly reviewing the root cause of issue and will take corrective actions to avoid any problems of this nature from reoccurring.”
Since the resolution requires user action, the affected costumers are urged to follow the information provided by the company in order to resynchronize their licenses. The company also notes that it “apologizes for any inconveniences to our customers caused by this issue.”