Cybersecurity firm SonicWall says it has released patches for some of its email security and firewall products to address a bug that resulted in failed junk box and message log updates.
Referred to as Y2K22, the bug exists because some software stores dates in a 32-bit integer format, where the largest possible number is 2147483647. Because the dates are stored in the YYMMDDhhmm format, when the new year started the date was converted to 2201010001, which was larger than the maximum allowed, and it resulted in system errors.
As expected, SonicWall, a provider of email anti-spam, virtual private network (VPN), unified threat management (UTM), network firewall, and other security solutions, first observed the issue manifesting on January 1, 2022.
Because of the bug, admins and email users were unable to access the junk box or un-junk new emails, and they couldn’t trace the incoming/outgoing email messages through logs, the company says.
On January 2, SonicWall released patches for the North America and Europe instances of its hosted Email Security and fully addressed the bug without requiring any user interaction.
The company also addressed the bug with the release of Email Security Appliance ES 10.0.15 and advises all customers using the on-premises deployment of the solution to upgrade to the patched version as soon as possible.
“Upgrade to ES 10.0.15 will automatically start the database rebuild and the process can take a few hours to complete depending on the amount of data. Junk Box emails and Message Logs will be displayed accurately after the database is fully rebuilt,” the company says.
Additionally, SonicWall patched the issue with the release of Firewall Anti-Spam Junk Store 7.6.9. The installer is available for TZ, NSA and SOHO platforms in the MySonicWall downloads section, under SonicOS 6.5.x firmware. SonicOS 7.x is not affected.
The Y2K22 issue has affected other companies as well, including Microsoft, which saw emails getting stuck in transport queues in on-premises Exchange Server deployments and its FIP-FS anti-malware scanning engine crashing.
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