Monday, 8 November 2004 16:13 EST

Enterprise-class dynamic threat management at small business prices

SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – November 8, 2004 – SonicWALL, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNWL), today launched Gateway Anti-Virus, a scalable, high-speed anti-virus solution which provides enterprise-class unified threat management at a fraction of the cost of competitive products. Gateway Anti-Virus is a real-time, proprietary technology which protects businesses of all sizes against virus threats originating from the Internet or between internal network segments.

This is the first solution on the market utilizing a per packet scanning engine, making SonicWALL’s solution unique in its ability to handle extremely large file sizes and hundreds of concurrent downloads, offering ultimate scalability and performance for today’s networked environment. Gateway Anti-Virus delivers intelligent, real-time scanning and virus protection directly on the security gateway and also combines SonicWALL’s Intrusion Prevention Service 2.0 and spyware protection.

Gateway Anti-Virus is included as the defining feature in the newest release of SonicWALL’s operating system, SonicOS 3.0. Additional capabilities supported by SonicOS 3.0 include spam filtering, VLAN support and dynamic routing. SonicOS 3.0 and Gateway Anti-Virus will be available across SonicWALL’s entire TZ 170 series and PRO series product lines, supported by a subscription service for signature updates, and current users of SonicWALL’s latest appliainces will not need to undertake hardware upgrades.

This unique solution features a patent-pending deep packet inspection engine. Delivering virus protection directly on the security gateway, Gateway Anti-Virus matches downloaded, e-mailed and compressed files against an extensive database of signatures containing viruses, worms, Trojans, vulnerabilities and spyware continuously updated by a combination of sources including SonicWALL’s SonicAlert Team. Gateway Anti-Virus is capable of scanning dozens of protocols using SonicWALL’s stream-based protocol analyzer for a complete and layered approach to anti-virus protection.

“Our existing customers will be delighted that they can benefit from Gateway Anti-Virus without needing to upgrade their current hardware,” said Matthew Medeiros, president and chief executive officer at SonicWALL. “Furthermore, our channel partners now have an even more compelling proposition for new customers. Once again, SonicWALL is demonstrating new levels of affordability and price-performance.”

"By incorporating Gateway Antivirus into the SonicOS, SonicWALL has boldly entered the newly defined United Threat Management security appliance market," said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC. “Additionally, it is quite rare to see products upgraded to this level of capability across the board. Customers will benefit because existing products can take advantage of the solution with the operating software upgrade, and the channel will have an opportunity to meet customers’ critical pain points.”

One in five machines is infected by viruses every month, and over 80 per cent of viruses are proliferated by email. According to IDC’s Enterprise Network Security Survey of February 2004, when asked to identify their most serious security challenge, most respondents pointed to lack of resources, confirming that the challenging array of threats and technology outstrips security and network administration staff capacity. SonicWALL Gateway AV is ideally positioned to meet these challenges because our solution offers more comprehensive protection on a single platform, reduced complexity and simplified implementation.

“New features available in SonicOS 3.0 will help expand business opportunities enormously,” said Mark Schulstad, sales and marketing director at Conjungi Networks, a SonicWALL Gold Medallion partner. “The powerful gateway anti-virus capability enables us to offer customers an additional anti-virus service layer to complement any solution they may already have on their host systems,” he continued, “while dynamic routing and VLAN support are just what many of our larger accounts are looking for.”

Network administrators can manage Gateway Anti-Virus, deploy host-based anti-virus, and manage remote installations using SonicWALL’s Global Management System. SonicWALL Gateway Anti-Virus includes a pro-active alerting mechanism that notifies network administrators when a new threat is discovered. Granular policy tools and an intuitive user interface enable administrators to configure a custom set of detection or prevention policies tailored to their specific network environment.

Features of SonicWALL’s Gateway Anti-Virus and SonicOS 3.0 operating system include:

Gateway Anti-Virus Scanning - Intelligent file-based virus and malicious code prevention by scanning in real-time

Inter-Zone Protection – Enables Gateway Anti-Virus scanning between the WAN and LAN as well as between each LAN segment on the network to provide extended internal network security.

Advanced File Decompression Technology - Automatically decompress and scan files on a per packet basis. Supported compression formats include: ZIP, Deflate and GZIP.

File-Based Scanning Protocol Support - Inspects over the most common protocols used in today’s networked environments, including SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP, FTP, NetBIOS, instant messaging and peer-to-peer applications.

Integrated Deep Packet Inspection Technology - Configurable, high-performance deep packet inspection architecture. Parallel processing maximizes available memory for exceptional performance

Intrusion Prevention - Complete protection from network-based application layer threats. Utilizes an extensive database of thousands of attack and vulnerability signatures

Spyware Protection - Blocks an extensive list of ActiveXâ-based spyware, adware and unwanted malware

Distributed Enforcement Architecture – Enables the automated delivery of updated signatures to SonicWALL’s Gateway Anti-Virus, Intrustion Prevention Service, Content Filtering Service and other signature-based services.

Spam Filtering – Real-time blackhole list spam filtering keeps spam out of the network and off mail servers

Management - Administrators can create global policies between security zones and group attacks by priority. Intuitive user interface and granular policy tools. Comprehensive logging of all intrusion attempts

About SonicWALL, Inc.
SonicWALL, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated network security, mobility, and productivity solutions for the SMB, enterprise, e-commerce, education, healthcare, retail/point-of-sale, and government markets. Core technologies include firewall, VPN,secure wireless, real time gateway anti-virus, spyware protection, spam blocking, intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering, desktop anti-virus, VLAN,and dynamic routing along with award-winning security management solutions. Together, these products and technologies provide the most comprehensive distributed enforcement architecture available. SonicWALL, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. SonicWALL trades on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol SNWL. For more information, contact SonicWALL at or visit the company web site at http://www.sonicwall.com/.

For Additional Information Contact:

Mary McEvoy
SonicWALL, Inc.
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Carolyn Robinson
The Hoffman Agency
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