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SonicOS 6.5, the Biggest Update in Company History, Delivers Powerful Security, Networking and Usability Capabilities

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Keeping organizations running safely, while improving business and user productivity in today’s accelerating threat environment, continues to be a non-trivial task for IT leaders. At the current pace of cyber attacks, we understand all too well that the effects of recent events, such as the Equifax, WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, have demonstrated their capacity to change the global business environment from normal to total hysteria in the blink of an eye.

When news breaks on new data breaches, we see a surge in conversations with our SonicWall partner and customer communities about security and risk assessments. These engagements reinforce our development commitment to ensure every new product release delivers more tools and capabilities to protect their networks and data, and subsequently avoid the unnecessary breach.

Delivering on that commitment, I am thrilled to introduce SonicWall’s biggest firewall feature release in its history. SonicWall SonicOS 6.5 is packed with powerful security, networking and usability capabilities, and meets the security operation requirements of organizations of various sizes and use cases. SonicOS 6.5 focuses on empowering IT leaders and their security teams to:

  • Elevate their breach detection and prevention capacity
  • Manage and enforce security controls across the entire organization
  • Bring the latest in wireless speed, performance and security for cloud and mobile users
  • Scale firewall networking, connectivity and performance for uncompromised, uninterrupted network services

SonicOS 6.5 delivers the following customer-focused outcomes as part of SonicWall’s expanding Automated Real-Time Breach Detection and Prevention Platform.

1. Bolster breach prevention capabilities for wired, wireless and cloud-enabled network environments

  • SonicOS 6.5 includes 60-plus new features, nearly half of which focus on enabling the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac Wave 2, to deliver matching network security performance, connectivity and security between wired and wireless networks.
  • The combination of SonicWall firewalls and the new SonicWave 802.11ac Wave 2 series of wireless access points gives customers the assurance that their users have uninterrupted, secure and fast access to business services and resources over wired and wireless connections.
  • Built-in features, like Wireless Deployment Tools, greatly aid in planning and building a robust wireless infrastructure, while Band Steering, Airtime Fairness and others improve the overall wireless service quality and performance to give users a safe, productive wireless experience. This helps eliminate dropped connections and slowness anytime, anywhere and in any environment within the workplace. Moreover, Dynamic VLAN assignment segments wireless users based on their roles and group associations to prevent advanced threats from spreading.
  • SonicOS 6.5 expands the threat API capabilities to help customers establish a path toward security automation. Through greater firewall collaboration with third-party security ecosystem, the firewall can automatically pull external intelligence sources for threat detection and protection, and security policies enforcement. For example, our Dynamic Botnet List feature enables customers to program their firewalls to download private third-party lists that contain desired security information, such as malicious IP and URL addresses, that they want the firewall to block for additional threat coverage.
  • For distributed organizations that have offices operating on different network domains, the new multi-domain security management capability in SonicOS 6.5 helps them manage and enforce discrete security policies across those domains. Based on service levels, risk tolerance, compliance and/or legal requirements, administrators can apply identical security controls to all domains or specific policy to a single domain or group of domains. This flexibility helps reduce the attack surface, eliminate security gaps, isolate risks and prevent any lateral movement of backdoor, network-based attacks, such as WannCry and NotPetya.

2. Increase scalability and connectivity of the firewall system

  • Advances in Layer 2/3 network and connectivity help customers optimize system availability and performance, and scale the firewall to deliver uncompromised, uninterrupted threat protection for every connected network domain. Supported on all SonicWall next-generation firewall (NGFW) models, including the newest NSA 2650, SonicOS 6.5 also supports daisy-chaining and management of Dell X-Series switches, Virtual Wire Mode, Dynamic LAG using LACP and Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP).
  • Using multi-domain security management in conjunction with virtual wire mode gives customers the ability to micro-segment and manage their virtual networks. These also provide independent security management, policies, controls and scanning to each virtual network with its separate security zone.

3. Improve ease of use and firewall management

  • SonicOS 6.5 introduces a completely redesigned user interface (UI) for a fresh, productive user experience (UX). This new UI gives users an executive dashboard loaded with security, user and traffic information. It also offers an organized, familiar and easily-understood menu-driven security management console. The dashboard presents a consolidated view of the live firewall security environment. This view includes a threat index, security events and data, network performance and connectivity, and application and bandwidth usage. The intuitive UI lets users complete security tasks faster, and with greater ease, from a single-pane-of-glass.
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Meet the New SonicWall NSA 2650 Next-Gen Firewall – Where Faster Meets More Secure

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Today I am excited to share the new addition to SonicWall’s NSA product family of Next-Generation Firewalls, the NSA 2650.  Three key trends form the design drivers for the new NSA 2650 –

  1. Wireless Devices Explosion – The demand for increased bandwidth from wireless networks is constantly on the rise with the growing number of wireless devices used per person. The wireless industry is going through waves of transformation (pun-intended) to support the requirement for more bandwidth. With the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless standards opening the door for multi-gig WiFi performance there is a strong need for switches and firewalls that connect to wireless access points to support these faster speeds without increasing the cost to the network infrastructure.
  2. Multi-gig Campus Requirements – Campus/branch networks require technology trend adoption without adding significant costs to the network infrastructure. For example, switches and firewalls supporting wireless access points must be able to do so with existing the Cat5e/Cat6 cabling infrastructure.
  3. Encrypted Traffic Surge – The trend towards Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) encryption has been on the rise for several years. Articles on the use of SSL/TLS encryption typically indicate that a little over 50% of all web traffic is now encrypted and that percentage is expected to continue growing. At SonicWall, data gathered by our Capture Labs Threat Research team shows the percentage to be a little higher, around 62%. We found that as web traffic grew throughout 2016, so did SSL/TLS encryption, from 5.3 trillion web connections in 2015 to 7.3 trillion in 2016. As vendors such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others continue to move to HTTPS, we expect the use of HTTPS to increase. So, organizations now require a secure platform to protect their network from the sophisticated encrypted threats that evade the traditional security mechanisms. 

The NSA 2650 firewall is aimed at campus and branch networks that must secure their environments against the growing number of threats looking for new ways to burrow into networks. The new NSA 2650 firewall is the first branch and campus firewall to deliver automated real-time breach detection and prevention, as well as TLS/SSL decryption and inspection, over multi-gigabit wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless networks. The SonicWall NSA 2650 represents the continuing evolution of SonicWall’s vision for a deeper level of network security without a performance penalty. More than simply a replacement for its predecessor, the NSA 2600, the NSA 2650 addresses the growing trends in web encryption and mobility by delivering a solution that meets the need for high-speed threat prevention.

The NSA 2650 is a 1U-device powered by four cores that provide the processing power necessary to support the compute-intensive deep packet inspection services such as:

  • Intrusion Prevention
  • Anti-Virus
  • Anti-Spyware
  • TLS/SSL inspection and decryption
  • Application Visualization
  • Application Control, Botnet detection
  • Geo-IP identification
  • Anti-Spam
  • User Identification and Advanced Threat Protection

Real-Time Inspection of SSL and TLS Attacks:

Unlike competing firewalls that perform well only with unencrypted connections, the NSA 2650 is built to support the need for more TLS/SSL inspection connections. The NSA 2650 features an unmatched number of encrypted web connections, up to 12,000 and performs deep packet inspection on each connection after first decrypting the traffic.

To protect against more advanced threats such as unknown and zero-day attacks that are concealed in encrypted web traffic, the NSA 2650 utilizes Capture, SonicWall’s cloud-based multi-engine sandboxing service that runs on the firewall. Suspicious files are sent to the award-winning SonicWall Capture service for analysis before rendering a verdict.

The NSA 2650 is a high-port density firewall that features 4×2.5-GbE SFP, 4×2.5-GbE, and 12×1-GbE interfaces with a dedicated management port. In addition to the multi-gigabit ports, high-speed processors and robust onboard memory, the NSA 2650 includes additional hardware enhancements that make it the ideal NGFW for mid-sized organization and distributed enterprises. An optional second power supply is available in case of failure for added redundancy. To help with scalability, the NSA 2650 includes two expansion slots. One is pre-populated with a 16 GB storage module to support features including logging, reporting, last signature update, backup and restores and more. The second slot provides flexibility to add future feature and physical capability expansion. Expandable in the future with additional modules, this versatile, high-port density firewall platform has the capacity to evolve through firmware updates to keep ahead of threats such as ransomware and intrusions.

With the NSA 2650, SonicWall yet again adds a ground-breaking security product to its portfolio. Combined with new 802.11ac Wave 2 SonicWave wireless access points, SonicWall creates a high-speed wireless network security solution that provides wireless users with an enhanced mobile experience.

Our latest firmware release, SonicOS 6.5, has more than 60 new features, and provides support for NSA 2650 hardware platform where faster meets more secure without any compromise on performance to all traffic including encrypted traffic.

Test drive the new NSA 2650 on SonicWall live demo: https://livedemo.sonicwall.com

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SonicWall and Dell EMC: A Strategic Partnership Providing Network Security Solutions to Stay Ahead of the Cyber Arms Race

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I am pleased to announce that, Dell EMC is now shipping the OEM version of the SonicWall next-generation cyber security firewall solutions in the United States and Canada.  Continuing on our long time partnership and resale relationship, Dell EMC will offer the powerful combination of SonicWall’s innovative threat protection technology and Dell EMC’s broad set of solutions from the data center all the way to endpoint devices.

Organizations today are looking to transform their business to drive IT innovation, enhance workforce mobility and reduce risk. However, digital transformation can increase exposure to risks that can directly impact an organization’s data, reputation, and credibility.

Addressing customer’s security needs as they move to the cloud, extend their network and storage solutions, and migrate to more mobile and IoT environments is critical with today’s threat landscape.  The combination of Dell EMC solutions and SonicWall is a great value add to Dell EMC customers and the partner community.

Here are some key points on the OEM:

SonicWall next-generation firewalls provide effective threat prevention through a layered approach on top of our multi-engine cloud-based SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection Service. This solution protects organizations from today’s most insidious threats including ransomware, encrypted malware, mobile threats and email-borne attacks.

The SonicWall OEM security solution is a critical affirmation of how important the Dell EMC – SonicWall partnership is for their large customer base and their Dell EMC Partner Program members.

For additional information, please see the following press release – https://www.sonicwall.com/en-us/about-sonicwall/news/press-releases/pr-articles/sonicwall-and-dell-emc-announce-oem-launch-of-next

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Capturing the World’s Latest Malware so You Can Fear Less

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If anyone ever needs proof on how effective SonicWall Capture Labs is, look back to the WannaCry ransomware attack in May 2017, and just last week the NotPetya malware. In contrast to over 250,000 endpoints compromised in over 150 countries, SonicWall customers with active security subscriptions were largely unaffected.

Why were they unaffected?

Our customers were protected because SonicWall had identified and created signatures for all exploits of the SMB vulnerability, as well as early versions of WannaCry, weeks in advance. Any of our customers with active Gateway Anti-virus and Intrusion Prevention System (GAV/IPS) services received those signatures automatically, and thereby blocked this ransomware variant and the worm that spread it across the globe. This was possible because SonicWall Capture Labs gathers millions of samples of malware in order to protect our customers from the latest threats.

In 2016, SonicWall’s Capture Labs Threat Research processed over 60 million unique pieces of malware that were previously unknown to us.  This included versions of polymorphic malware, newly developed malicious code and zero-day attacks. The result of this work created countless signatures and other countermeasures that protected our customers from the latest attacks across our product portfolio.

So where does SonicWall get all of these malware samples?

With over 1 million sensors placed around the world, our Capture Labs Research Team receives the largest amount of data from real customer traffic. Our SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Service is a network sandbox that runs suspicious code to find unknown malicious code. Business networks will encounter an average of 28 new, zero-day versions of malware over a calendar year, Capture ATP is designed specifically to prevent this.

In addition, SonicWall participate in numerous industry collaboration efforts such as the Microsoft MAPP program so our researchers receive new verified threats before the public. We also actively engage in numerous international threat research communities and freelance researchers so our in-house team possesses samples of uncommon attacks and vulnerabilities.

Read this eBook to learn how to protect against ransomware with a multi-layer threat elimination chain to stop known and discover unknown malicious code targeting your organization.

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Locky, Then WannaCry, Now Petya. Is This The New Normal in Cyber Security?

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Updated June 28, 2017

As I type this, news reports continue to roll in about yet the latest massive global ransomware attack. This time, the payload appears to be a ransomware called Petya. SonicWall Capture Labs identified the original Petya variants in 2016. However, this time it appears to be delivered by Eternal Blue, one of the exploits that was leaked from the NSA back in April. This is the same exploit that was used in the WannaCry attack.

Infected systems will initially display a flashing skull, followed by a lock screen:

Once again, the cyber arms race continues to evolve. If I were to boil this down to its essence, what we are now seeing is that cyber criminals are combining exploits and attacks in creative ways that are not necessarily new, but still quite effective. Like mixing cocktails, the ingredients are all well known, but the exact mix can be completely new.

Attack details: SonicWall customers are protected

Today, June 27, SonicWall Capture Labs began tracking a high number of Petya ransomware attacks against SonicWall customers. Petya as a malware payload is not new. In fact, we reported in the 2017 Annual SonicWall Threat Report that it was second only to Locky in the number of infections we noted last year. The good news for SonicWall customers that are using our security services is that we have had signatures for certain variants of Petya since March 2016. Then, in April 2017 Capture Labs analyzed and released protection for the Eternal Blue exploit that Shadow Brokers leaked from the NSA. Also, on June 27, the Capture Labs Threat Research Team issued a new alert with multiple signatures protecting customers from the new Petya Ransomware Family.

Recommendations for SonicWall customers

As a SonicWall customer, ensure that your next-generation firewall has a current active Gateway Security subscription, in order to receive automatic real-time protection from known ransomware attacks such as Petya. Gateway Security includes Gateway Anti-virus (GAV), Intrusion Prevention (IPS), Botnet Filtering, and Application Control. This set of technology:

  • Includes signatures against Petya (part of GAV)
  • Protects against vulnerabilities outlined in Microsoft’s security bulletin MS17-010 (part of IPS)

Since SonicWall Email Security uses the same signatures and definitions as Gateway Security, we can block the emails that deliver the initial route to infection. To block malicious emails, ensure all Email Security services are up to date. Since 65% of all ransomware attacks happen through phishing emails, this also needs to be a major focus when giving security awareness training. Additionally, customers with SonicWall Content Filtering Service should activate it to block communication with malicious URLs and domains, which work similar to the way botnet filtering disrupts C&C communication.

Because more than 50% of malware is encrypted, as a best practice, always deploy SonicWall Deep Packet Inspection of all SSL/TLS (DPI SSL) traffic. This will enable your SonicWall security services to identify and block all known ransomware attacks. Enabling DPI SSL also allows the firewall to examine and send unknown files to the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service for multi-engine sandbox analysis. We recommend that you deploy Capture ATP in order to discover and stop unknown ransomware variants. Because of the rapid proliferation of malware variants, SonicWall leverages deep learning algorithms to provide automated protection against both known and zero-day threats. The combination of the SonicWall Capture Threat Network and SonicWall Capture ATP sandboxing provides the best defense against newly emerging hybrid attacks such as Petya. As always, we strongly recommend that you also apply the Windows patch provided by Microsoft to protect against the Shadow Brokers leaked exploits as well.  And it is always a good idea to maintain current backups of all critical data to allow recovery in the event of a ransomware event.

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Ransomware: Are You Protected From the Next Outbreak?

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Will you be ransomware’s next victim? Can ransomware encrypt your data and hold it hostage until you pay a ransom?

Organizations large and small across industries and around the globe are at risk of a ransomware attack. The media mostly reports attacks at large institutions, such as the Hollywood Hospital that suffered over a week offline in 2016 after a ransomware attack encrypted files and demanded ransom to decrypt the data. However, small businesses are affected also. In fact, Kaspersky research reported that small and medium-size businesses were hit the hardest, 42 percent of them falling victim to a ransomware attack over a 12-month period. Of those, one in three paid the ransom, but one in five never got their files back, despite paying. Whether you are part of a large organization or a small business, you are at risk.

The recent WannaCry ransomware attack was the largest ransomware campaign ever. In the course of a weekend, WannaCry spread to over 250,000 computers in 150 countries, crippling operations at hospitals, telecom providers, utility companies, and other businesses around the globe.

Once primarily an issue for Windows desktops, ransomware attacks have now occurred across many device types and operating systems, including KeRanger, a ransomware variant that emerged in 2016 that targeted Apple OS X. This variant was hidden in a compromised version of the Transmission BitTorrent client and affected about 6,500 computers within a day and a half.

These attacks often start with an internet file download or email attachment that seems innocuous but actually is hiding malware that encrypts files. End user productivity grinds to a halt and your help desk lights up. Worse, your business can suffer both financially and also from damage to your reputation.

Can your security solutions protect from this threat? Maybe. Legacy security technologies are often signature based, great for detecting “known” malware, but ineffective against “unknown” or zero-day attacks. To better detect unknown threats, security professionals are adding an additional layer of security and deploying advanced threat detection technologies, such as network sandboxes specifically SonicWall Capture ATP, that analyze the behavior of suspicious files and uncover hidden malware. To learn more about what it takes to keep malicious code out of your network, read our whitepaper: Why Network Sandboxing is Required to Stop Ransomware.

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