[ISN] SonicWALL licensing snafu short-circuits protection

[InfoSec News]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/03/sonicwall_licensing_snafu/

By John Leyden
The Register
3rd December 2008

SonicWALL has apologised for a license server outage that left some 
customers without firewall or email filtering protection for hours 
yesterday.

The snafu affected enterise users of SonicWALL UTM Firewall, Email 
Security, Content Security appliances and meant that content filter, 
intrusion prevention and antivirus protection for some of its users were 
temporarily "switched off" because of reset license keys that were 
treated as invalid.

"Beginning 12/2/2008 approximately 2:00 AM Pacific time, some SonicWALL 
products contacting a particular SonicWALL licensing server began 
receiving erroneous responses. This issue may have caused the products' 
license keys to be reset, and in some cases may have affected the 
products' operation," SonicWALL said in a statement on its site.

"The issue has been corrected and all servers and licensing functions 
have been restored," it added.

The security firm has posted instructions on how to resynchronise 
affected systems with licensing servers.

[...]