[Full-disclosure] Sonicwall license servers down .. all customers affected

["IT Security" <it.security.lists@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Sonicwall (makers of various security products) has had their license
manager (server) go haywire overnight and it's "reset" (meaning invalidated)
the licenses on all of their email security products. This means customers
can't login to their own systems (a good case against draconian DRM like
this). Calls to support have gone straight to voicemail all morning, and no
ETA for resolution yet exists.

This is affecting **all** of their customers, as far as I can tell (and
based on what I'm told by their general support ticket-taker).

Their forum (probably requires registration) is full of complaints about it.
Screenshots of it and other problem areas are available on request .. but I
don't want to email them to this entire list).

The first alert was these warnings :

----------------------------------------------------------------
~~ SonicWALL Email Security Alert (6.2.2.1071) ~~
----------------------------------------------------------------

[Summary: Your Email Security licenses have been reset.]

Details:
Host Name: **ourmailhost**
Description: The Email Security licenses have been reset at
12/02/2008 04:18 EST. The email filtering will not be
working.

TimeStamp:
LocalTime: Tue Dec 2 04:18:49 2008
GMT: Tue Dec 2 09:18:49 2008

Additional Information:
Recommended Action: Please contact SonicWall Technical
Support.

A response from their technical support on the issue went like this :

"The issue is on our backend server who stores the registrations, some ES
appliances got licences resetted. The exact cause is still being analized
with high priority. In those cases entering the mysonicwall credentials or
uploading file solve the issue. Kind Regards Ivan"

And as of now, their license server is **still** off-line :

$ telnet licensemanager.sonicwall.com 443
Trying 204.212.170.143...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

DRM schemes like this only cause problems for the LEGITIMATE customers .

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