This is the daily story of a technology consultant!

• SonicWALL’s SuperMassive E10800 is the highest overall protection Next-Generation Firewall to earn NSS Labs “Recommend” rating.
• “Those that consider the SonicWALL brand to be associated with SMB UTM products will need to reevaluate their opinion,” said Vikram Phatak, chief technology officer at NSS Labs
• “For high-end multi-gigabit environments looking to upgrade defenses from their current firewall to a next-generation firewall, the advanced architecture of the SonicWALL SuperMassive E10800 running SonicOS 6.0 provides an extremely high level of protection and performance.”
• The SuperMassive E10800 was measured by NSS Labs at 18.9 Gbps of inspected throughput.
• The SonicWALL device yielded the highest level of real-world HTTP Connections per Second (CPS), ranging from 55,000 to 238,000 CPS for session lengths spanning 44KB to 1.7KB.
• The E10800 exhibited less than 30 microseconds of latency under UDP test traffic conditions.

According to the NSS Labs Next-Generation Firewall Product Analysis, the SonicWALL SuperMassive E10800 “offer[s] some highly evolved features suitable for large enterprises and multi-tenant / service provider deployments, making it straightforward to apply complex policies in a targeted manner across multiple nested groups of firewalls in large-scale deployments.”

Read the entire press release here.

As of last week SonicOS 5.8.1.5-46o was changed to General Release status. SonicWALL defines General Release firmware as “a mature, widely deployed and proven release, suitable for typical use cases and is the firmware of choice for environments that are willing to trade off new features for code maturity. General Releases are used for production environments.”

SonicOS 5.8 is the major release that added Application Visualization, NetFlow/IPFIX exporting, Cloud Gateway Anti-Virus, and other new features to SonicWALL’s firewall line. Application Visualization, NetFlow/IPFIX exporting and Application Firewall (App Rules) are features that begin on the TZ210 and are on all NSA and E10000 series models.

Mobile Connect for Android

SonicWALL has released their Mobile Connect SSLVPN client for Android version 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Mobile Connect is now available for Apple iPhone, iPad and Google Android. SonicWALL has the only SSLVPN client for these devices that has End Point Control when connecting to an Aventail running 10.5.4 or greater. With Aventail 10.6.1 users will also be able to enforce Anti-Virus on the Android with EPC.

Attend one of our weekly Security Center 9 webinars and you will learn:

• Kaspersky’s operating system and data management system requirements
• The applications that can be managed from Kaspersky’s centralized management and reporting tool
• Logical network and administration server hierarchy and functions
• How Kaspersky remotely removes over 120 applications with built-in scripts
• The steps for a quick and easy deployment with centralized malware policy creation, installation methods, and scheduling
• The breadth of reporting functionality included in the product and the ability to create custom reports

Click here to visit our website and register for one of the webinars.

Click here to go to our Webinar page to find out more!

Many speculative bits have been spilled on the group behind Stuxnet and its precursor Duqu, with our own researchers posting at least a half dozen Securelist writeups on Duqu findings alone. MS11-087 patches up the delivery vector for Duqu itself. This kernel mode vulnerability was publicly identified and confirmed at the beginning of November, but could well have been used quietly in attacks around the world for a year or more.

The targeted functionality provides TrueType font parsing capabilities for the OS, and the group abused these components by delivering exploits in the form of Word Documents attached to emails interesting to their individual victims, a technique known as spear-phishing. The flawed code has been known to impact only a very select set of systems throughout the world.

The other headline grabbing event and code that was anticipated to be released is known as the SSL BEAST vulnerability. We covered the potential hysteria surrounding the Ekoparty conference demo in Argentina a couple of months ago, where a researcher demonstrated SSL being cracked on a Windows system. There were no public reports whatsoever of this flaw being attacked, and Microsoft is delaying its release to ensure that its browser cannot be hacked in this way without compatibility issues, following the lead of Google Chrome and Firefox.

A slew of other patches were released this time around, with Internet Explorer, Powerpoint, and other components, including the Chinese font producing Pinyin IME component, all being updated. It’s interesting that even Microsoft considers exploit code likely to be published for at least a dozen of them, but does not consider many of them critical for admins to patch. One that stands out as a candidate for “Critical” in my book is the Active Directory problem. Organizations that have been under persistent targeted attacks may consider this one to be very urgent, with Domain Controllers and Active Directory of high interest to their adversaries in past attacks.

Source: Kaspersky Labs Daily Digest

Fool techie friends with fake-gadget ‘gifts’

It’s not often we send out a special alert to Clients but we feel that is important to pass along some information about an ACH hoax that has been circulating through many email boxes lately.  If you transfer any kind of funds through ACH (Automatic Clearing House) such as payroll transactions, recurring invoices or membership dues you need to pay particular attention to any correspondence you may be receiving related those transfers. A fellow SonicWALL Gold Partner has had at least two clients affected to date who have been compromised by replying with information to a seemingly official email. The emails seen lately have ACH in the title and refer to a failed transaction.

Our quick advice – if it looks the least bit suspicious to you, make a call to the bank or clearing house that you use.  Prevention is always better than a cure!

Check it out here