Barracuda Networks managed to inadvertantly launch a denial of service on it’s customers earlier today. I was speaking with a friend of mine who has their appliance and he informed me that Barracuda had managed to push out an incomplete virus signature which ended up queuing up all inbound email. Not the desired effect for a business. Here is a clip of their public statement regarding the incident (via ISC)
Barracuda Networks remains committed to open communications with our customer base. This morning, we had an outage that affected a large number of Barracuda Spam Firewall customers. The affected customers were Barracuda Spam Firewall customers employing the virus scan feature of the Barracuda Spam Firewall using virus definition 1.5.144. The outage resolved itself with a subsequent Energize Update to virus definition 1.5.145.
Details:
Beginning at 4:53 AM PST today, a faulty virus definition was released that had an incomplete virus database (virus definition 1.5.144). To protect our customers in the event such a circumstance occurred, the Barracuda Spam Firewall has a built in precautionary feature which automatically prevents email from being sent through in order to keep potentially infected emails from being delivered. Any Barracuda Spam Firewall in the field that had received virus definition 1.5.144 immediately began to queue all incoming messages until the complete virus database became available.
At 7:02 AM PST, the majority of Barracuda Spam Firewalls automatically received virus definition 1.5.145 containing the complete virus database, and email began to process normally for those customers previously affected.
The cause of the incomplete virus definition has been identified and resolved, and additional measures have been put in place to prevent this issue from occuring in the future.
[tags]Barrcuda Networks, Spam, Antispam, Virus, Email, Spam Firewalls[/tags]
