Security News > 2022 > January > SonicWall explains why firewalls were caught in reboot loops
In a weekend update, SonicWall said the widespread reboot loops that impacted next-gen firewalls worldwide were caused by signature updates published on Thursday evening not being correctly processed.
While SonicWall provided a workaround to revive the impacted firewalls by disabling incremental updates to IDP, GAV, and SPY signature databases, the company didn't explain what was causing the issues.
"Certain firewalls running SonicOS 7.0 were not able to correctly process the signature update published on Jan. 20. During signature update parsing by one of the components within SonicOS, a corner case error condition led to a restart or connectivity disruption. Firewalls are designed to fetch new signatures on startup, so this process repeated after a restart," the company said.
"SonicWall updated the signatures to address the issue, including refreshed timestamps. Firewalls will automatically pull the full signature update, so no end-user action is required. SonicWall has identified the root cause and implemented multiple changes to prevent future occurrences."
Customers should reach out to SonicWall support if the new signature updates or the temporary fix don't address the Gen 7 firewall reboot loop issues.
Models include TZ series firewalls for SMBs and branches, the NSa series firewalls for mid-sized enterprises, the NSsp series firewalls for large enterprises, data centers, and service providers, and the NSv series virtual firewalls.