Tag: SonicWall

SonicWall snaps up Banyan Security.

Posted on January 3, 2024 by - News

Global cyber secrurity giant SonicWall announced today that it has bought the cloudy security outfit Banyan Security.

This deal boosts SonicWall’s portfolio by adding zero trust security trusted by big-name Fortune 100 firms to small businesses ditching old cloud security solutions systems, including Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).

SonicWall boss Bob Vankirk said: “For years, firewalls have been the backbone of cyber security defences. But with the rise of cloud computing and secure access service edge (SASE), the industry is changing its focus to more complete and flexible approaches that include cloud security and ZTNA as a must. SonicWall and Banyan Security will offer cloud-based secure access service edge (SASE) solutions that help partners deliver a security architecture for any stage of their customers’ cloud journey.”

SonicWall snaps up Solutions Granted

Posted on November 17, 2023 by - News

Security outfit SonicWall has acquired managed security service provider (MSSP), Solutions Granted (SGI).

The acquisition expands Milpitas SonicWall’s portfolio to include US-based security operations centre services (SOCaaS) and managed detection and response (MDR).

No one is saying how much the deal cost.

SonicWall president and CEO, Bob VanKirk said that offering MDR and managed services was important to IT teams. The collaboration aims to provide cost-effective threat defence solutions and a comprehensive portfolio for managing security.

SonicWall appoints Bateup to run Ireland operation

Posted on July 2, 2020 by - News

SonicWall announced it had appointed Tristan Bateup as country manager for Ireland.

Bateup has over a decade of experience in the cybersecurity industry, including five years managing SonicWall’s partner business at long-time distributor Exertis. From there, he joined SonicWall, where he served as strategic account manager for the UK and Ireland until his recent appointment in February 2020.

Will Benton, Regional Director, Northern Europe at SonicWall, said: “Bateup’s experience and skills have already proved invaluable in establishing our presence in Ireland since his appointment. SonicWall places great importance in its partner relationships, and Tristan’s strong experience on both sides of the relationship contributes to bringing us even closer to our partner network in Ireland.”

SonicWall hires BAE bloke as EMEA channel boss

Posted on April 3, 2020 by - News

Security outfit SonicWall has appointed Spencer Starkey as the new EMEA Head of Distribution and Inside Channel Account Manager. Starkey will be responsible for educating distributors, partners and resellers on the value of SonicWall’s threat intelligence, security services and Capture Cloud platform for customers.

SonicWall VP, EMEA Sales Terry Greer-King said that the company was growing and Starkey will help accelerate channel sales and streamline partner efficiencies across the region. He has years of experience, and in-depth knowledge and expertise in sales and channel strategy which will help build and strengthen our long-term partner relationships.

Malware hitting new highs

Posted on July 11, 2018 by - News

giant bugSonicWall has added up some numbers and reached the conclusion that malware volume, ransomware attacks, encrypted threats and chip-based attacks are getting worse.

In its  mid-year update of the 2018 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report, the outfit said that there were huge consequences for enterprises, government agencies, educational and financial institutions, and organisations in targeted verticals.

SonicWall CEO Bill Conner said: “SonicWall has been using machine learning to collect, analyze and leverage cyber threat data since the ‘90s. This commitment to innovation and emerging technology is part of the foundation that helps deliver actionable threat intelligence, security efficacy and automated real-time breach detection and prevention to our global partners and customers.”

The malware boom of 2017 has shown no signs of stopping through the first half of 2018. SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers recorded 5.99 billion malware attacks during the first two quarters of the year. At this same point in 2017, SonicWall logged 2.97 billion malware attacks.

On a month-to-month basis in 2018, malware volume remained consistent in the first quarter before dropping to less than one billion per month across April, May and June. These totals were still more than double that of 2017.

Published in March’s original report, SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers found that ransomware attacks dropped significantly — from 645 million to 184 million — between 2016 and 2017.

SonicWall now shows ransomware attacks surging in first six months of 2018. There have been 181.5 million ransomware attacks year to date. This marks a 229 percent increase over this same time frame in 2017.

The use of encryption continues to grow for legitimate traffic and malicious cyberattacks alike. In 2017, SonicWall reported that 68 percent of sessions were encrypted by SSL/TLS standards. Through six months of 2018, 69.7 percent of sessions are leveraging encryption.

Cybercriminals are strategically following this trend to help prevent their malicious payloads from being discovered. Encrypted attacks increased 275 percent when compared to this time in 2017.

“Encrypted attacks are a critical challenge in the industry. Far too few organizations are aware that cybercriminals are using encryption to circumvent traditional networks security controls, and others aren’t activating new mitigation techniques, such Deep Packet Inspection of SSL and TLS traffic (DPI-SSL). We predict encrypted attacks to increase in scale and sophistication until they become the standard for malware delivery. And we’re not that far off.”

The SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMITM) technology now protects customers from Spectre chip-based attacks. SonicWall Capture Labs threat researchers validated RTDMI mitigation against Spectre variants and false positives in production.

“It’s critical for cybersecurity leaders to build innovative solutions that adapt to the changing threat landscape to better protect customers”, said SonicWall CTO John Gmuender. “Cybercriminals increasingly hide weaponized code with more sophisticated obfuscation and advanced custom encryption techniques, then expose, detonate and wipe the weaponized code from memory in real time.”

Since January 2018, RTDMI has identified and blocked more than 12,300 never-before-seen cyberattacks and malware variants.

Included in the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service, RTDMI identifies and mitigates even the most insidious cyber threats where weaponry is exposed for less than 100 nanoseconds. RTDMI protects against chip-based attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, as well as attacks leveraging PDFs and Microsoft Office documents.

“Existing industry sandbox solutions do not perform true real-time analysis of malware and, therefore, ‘blink’ and miss detecting sophisticated weaponry, exposing customers to dangerous threats,” said Gmuender. “By never ‘blinking,’ RTDMI provides incredibly powerful technology that advances state-of-the-art threat protection to block sophisticated attack vectors and protect customers in real time.”

 

Infinigate signs pact with SonicWall

Posted on July 9, 2018 by - News

satanic pactIT security distributor Infinigate UK  has signed an agreement with SonicWall to distribute its range of real-time breach detection and prevention cybersecurity gear.

The new agreement covers the UK and Ireland and extends an already successful partnership between the two companies across nine other countries in Europe.

Murray Pearce, Managing Director of Infinigate UK, believes the decision to partner with SonicWall was an easy one since SonicWall is a key player in the unified threat management and cybersecurity sector. In addition, SonicWall’s partnership approach fits perfectly with Infinigate’s own partner-centric strategy. “The increased investment that SonicWall has made in their products, roadmap and channel tools since becoming an independent company has accelerated its technology portfolio and capability in how it supports partners. It is an exciting time to be working with the SonicWall team”, explained Pearce.

Infinigate’s plans for growing SonicWall’s channel sales include putting in place a dedicated team of technical, sales and renewals to recruit and engage partners, and create additional demand for the products. “We’ve developed a best practice methodology for recruiting and engaging partners, which is our 3xCtm Partner Success Model. Our channel network is segmented so that we can create a clear value proposition that is targeted to the right partners.

“We know from our research that SonicWall partners highly value strong technical support and services, so we have invested ahead to ensure we have really strong capability in this area”, added Pearce.

Michael Berg, Executive Director of EMEA Sales at SonicWall said: “SonicWall is excited about expanding its partnership with Infinigate. We are confident in Infinigate’s abilities to educate and enable partners. With a strong IT security focus, professional services and technical support capabilities, Infinigate is an ideal partner for us.”

According to Berg, “SonicWall has significant plans for growth in the UK and over the last 12 months, we’ve seen a 147 per cent increase worldwide in partners signing up to the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program.  With our recent announcements, we expect an increasing number of enterprise-focused partners to enrol in the program given the functionality and value we are bringing to new segments of the market.

“We will achieve further growth through partnerships with leading companies, such as Infinigate, leveraging their established relationships with over 2,000-plus security and networking resellers.”

Dell adds security add-on service

Posted on March 1, 2016 by - News, Products

michael-dell-2Tin box shifter Dell has announced an add-on service to its SonicWALL firewall product.

The cloud offering, called the SonicWALL Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Service analysies files and traffic for threats using three filter engines.

These engines are the VMRay third-generation Analyzer, Lastline Breach Detection platform and the Dell SonicWALL Sonic Sandbox.

Dell thinks that, combined, they deliver better protection against the growing prevalence of zero-day attacks which are designed to evade sandboxes like badly behaved kittens.

In addition to having multiple analysis engines, the solution has hypervisor-level analysis and full-system emulation.

Dell’s system sends suspicious files to the cloud for analysis and there is no limit on the file size so it can capture a lot of malware in its net. Once a threat has been detected, Dell sends remediation signatures through its existing solutions.

Dell thinks that it can block malware at the gateway, and provide a much more effective protection of the network.

The Dell SonicWALL Capture ATP Service solution is currently available as a beta and will be available for purchase “by mid-year 2016.”

Dell engages in channel love in

Posted on June 4, 2014 by - News

dellbudaTen years ago, the very word Dell was enough to send VARs, VADs and, let’s face it, the rest of the channel into streams of invective, punctuated by words you wouldn’t want your nan to hear you speak. Like the expletive “direct sales”, for example.

But, it seems, everything has changed and now Dell loves the channel and, incredibly, the channel seems to love Dell too.  Channel Eye took time out from our incredibly stressful schedule to spend a day at a security partner reseller conference in Budapest and got to chat to several senior executives and resellers too, for that matter, who spelled out the sea changes that have happened at the Round Rock company.

While Dell is still seen by many as the PC tin maker that put the wind up conventional and indirect players like HP and the rest, it’s made a number of acquisitions in the last few years that mean the barque is now being steered in an entirely different direction. Those include SonicWALL, Quest and others.

The changes have been engineered at the highest level – that is to say by Michael Dell himself – with the assistance of senior exec Cheryl Cook. Unbelievably for an old channel hack like me, 32 percent of Dell’s business now goes the indirect route, worth an estimated $20 billion of revenue, under the umbrella of Partner Direct.

Channel Eye interviewed senior members of the EMEA channel team, including Andy Zollo and Marvin Blough – executive director of Dell’s worldwide channels and alliances. We also had the opportunity to talk to Patrick Sweeney, executive director of product management at the corporation.

Sweeney said: “Dell is in the process of becoming an end to end supplier of scalable systems. Dell continues to build PCs, but relies on value added resellers (VARs) to be trusted advisors [to customers].” He said that Dell is now a serious player in software and security and offers products that he claimed favourably compete with the likes of Cisco, Fortinet and others.  The company, he said, invests heavily in R&D, has a wide breadth of products and the idea of Dell as a major player in security and software is promoted by Michael Dell himself when he makes major announcements.

In fact, Dell has something like 124 VARs in the EMEA region. The trend is that larger companies have started to rely on VARs to help them through the IT maze, whether that be in the cloud, in big data, or in security.  Florian Malecki, who is the international product marketing director at Dell, said his company also relies on value added distributors (VADs) to generate events and training schemes.

How does it all work? Under the Dell umbrella of Partner Direct, the company operates certification for its channel partners at different levels, said Zollo. The tiers are premier partners, preferred partners and registered partners, but, he said, Dell is about to introduce a fourth category – managed service providers (MSPs).  Dell continues to roll out partnership initiatives and concedes that while it still has direct customers, the trend is to move towards an indirect model to allow it to penetrate different markets.  It’s impossible to operate a direct model in the many markets it now plays in.

Zollo says that the company has a “direct touch” sales team that cross sells all the products it has – and this umbrella model means that Dell GCC is able to operate across a wide area of customers and partners.

Who would have thought it? Dell was once a company that wouldn’t even talk to channel publications like ours. But it looks as if it will be talking to us more and more in the future. It relies on its VARs and its VADs for deep levels of specialisation, training and support.

We guess that HP must be gazing at all of this with quite some alarm. And Lenovo, for that matter.

Get yourself a firewall or get stung

Posted on June 3, 2014 by - News, Products

Dell logoPatrick Sweeney, executive director of network security at Dell, talked about next generation firewalls and how the world+dog needs them because of increased security threats.

He said Dell processed 50,000 pieces of malware a day and that means 50,000 new counter measures a day too – with updates to its firewalls pushed out between eight and twelve times a day. Mobility is changing and is being compromised – it’s not just the enterprise. Security from little to large companies all face the same problems and threats.

There’s an increase in criminal to criminal activities, with exploit auction houses, and people offering a distribution service as well as Botnet rental.  The biggest companies in the world and many governments have been badly compromised.

Encryption is used offensively by malware designers which makes it hard to defend networks. Algorithms to defend against these threats must be able to cope with encrypted malware too. Defence has to be at multiple levels, including deep packet inspection to filter content, offer anti-spam, SSL inspection, intrusion protection and others.

Dell has introduced several new features to its SonicWALL offerings including new content filtering policies that are downloaded when people are on the road – an enforced client deployment mode for CFS and AV. Application control is important too, so that highly threatening applications are prevented from being runnable on the network.

Dell to extend its channel model

Posted on June 3, 2014 by - News

dellchannDespite the BBC World Service this morning claiming that Dell will carry on making desktops, notebooks and servers in perpetuity, there’s another string  to the hardware giant’s bow.

And here in Budapest there’s a three day security conference which is exclusively about software. And, of course, security.

This all follows Dell’s acquisitions of Force 10 and SonicWALL – it hopes that will help it build its data centre business.

Andy Zollo, VP of Dell EMEA, opened up by asking how long the Brits stayed up last night. Apparently until 3AM, it seems. Growth areas include the cloud, big data, and mobile. Mobile he said generates 592MB per month for each device. And 50 percent of mobile device traffic is video. He said by the end of this year there will be more mobile devices than people on the planet.

Dell’s revenues from security in EMEA accounts for 51 percent of revenues. Its products it is positioning include security and data protection.  It has formed a security named account team covering different sectors with around 2,000 customers across Europe. It intends to build its channel presence in the future. There was a lot of direct business while SonicWALL was largely indirect.  Zollo says Dell EMEA is placing its best on the indirect model.

Dell attacks Cisco in mid-market

Posted on May 7, 2013 by - News, Products

mikedellcloseupDell is talking big about taking on network behemoth Cisco, announcing its SonicWall NSA firewalls that it believes will disrupt the market.

Dell is promising protection for mid-sized organisations with its latest firewalls, promising customers that the SonicWall NSA software will assure “optimal network performance and total cost of ownership”, going on to say that its technology will even “render competitors’ traditional firewalls obsolete”.

Using a patented single pass, low latency Reassembly Free Deep Packet Inspection, or RFDPI engine, this kit, Dell claims, has enough power to take note of all network traffic, no matter the port or protocol, and can block threats before they worm their way into the network.

Dell boasts that the RFDPI engine has the twin benefit of combining a firewall with an intrusion protection system, and the software sports features like 10GbE SPF+ interfaces and high performance SSL decryption. Medium sized organisations will be able to use the kit to take advantage of security usually only afforded for enterprise grade network security, Dell claims.

Dell exec director in product management, Patrick Sweeney, said the company believes these “products are game-changers as we take on Cisco in the critical mid-market”.

As web threats get more sophisticated, penny pinching mid sized organisations swamped by economic stagnation need excellent security to make sure they are not even more vulnerable than they already are. Problems with funding staff training or specialisation are common, too, so Dell thinks its latest product can help.

Dell Sonicwall’s SuperMassive firewall works on LittleTiny power

Posted on March 4, 2013 by - News, Products

dellsigDell SonicWall, the acquisition that rolled the company into Dell Software Group, has announced an enterprise class firewall that promises, the firm says, to deliver robust security, performance and scalability, the SuperMassive 9000 series.

The firewall is capable of providing threat protection at multi gigabit speds with close to zero latency, Dell Sonicwall said. Included in the series are the 9600, 9400 and 9200 models which all offer IPS and application control performance in speeds up to 12Gbps. Dell claims the products are power efficient with total cost of ownership and power, space and cooling requirements optimised with specifically for enterprise data centres.

Dell rolled out a client at the University of South Florida’s Pediatrics Epidemiology Center, which said that the organisation saved heaps of cash with the investment and performance increased “10-fold” after deploying.

Dell SonicWall’s exec, Patrick Sweeney, urged companies to consider the damages volume, form and sophistication of malware can have on corporate networks. “At the same time, enterprises struggle to balance the need for network access and performance with network protection,” Sweeney said.

Dell boasted that the SuperMassive 9000 series can get to threats before they enter networks, by casting its eye on all traffic worming its way in. This is largely thanks to Dell’s Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection, or RFDPI, tech, which looks at every packet across all ports.