SonicWall confirms ‘critical’ vulnerabilty in SMA 100 devices

A week after warning IT departments of a possible problem with its SMA 100 devices, SonicWall has confirmed a ‘critical’ fault in its firmware.

Yesterday afternoon, the company issued a statement saying it has confirmed a zero-day vulnerability on SMA 100 series units running version 10.x code. The vulnerability affects both physical and virtual SMA 100 10.x devices including the SMA 200, SMA 210, SMA 400, SMA 410, SMA 500v.

SMA 100 firmware prior to 10.x is unaffected. A patch is expected by the end of today.

In the meantime SonicWall said customers have the following options:

1. • If you must continue operation of the SMA 100 Series appliance until a patch is available
     • Enable multifactor authentication.  The company said is is “crucial” until the patch is available’
     • Reset user passwords for accounts that utilized the SMA 100 series with 10.X firmware
   • If the SMA 100 series (10.x) is behind a firewall, block all access to the SMA 100 on the firewall;
   • Shut down the SMA 100 series device (10.x) until a patch is available; or
   • Load firmware version 9.x after a factory default settings reboot.  If this is chosen the 10.x settings must be backed up. SonicWall says direct downgrade of firmware 10.x to 9.x with settings intact is not supported.  Users must first reboot the device with factory defaults and then either load a backed up 9.x configuration or reconfigure the SMA 100 from scratch. It also says administrators should follow multifactor authentication best practice security guidance if you choose to install 9.x.

SonicWall firewalls and SMA 1000 series appliances, as well as all respective VPN clients, are unaffected and remain safe to use.