Firewall expert SonicWall affected by the year 2022 bug

The “The Year 2022” bug affects more and more products and services. After the water supply in Austria, the incorrectly running clocks at Honda, and the e-mail problems at Microsoft, it has now become known that the SonicWall firewalls have been affected. SonicWall has confirmed that some of its email security and firewall products are affected by the Y2K22 bug, which has caused various bugs since the turn of the year.

As the Company announced in the meantime, e-mail users and administrators on the affected systems (hosted e-mail security, e-mail security appliance, and firewall anti-spam junk store) can no longer access the junk box or newly received e-mails from the junk -Remove filter. According to SonicWall, customers will also no longer be able to track incoming and outgoing emails using the message logs as they are no longer updated. The regular functions of the products are therefore severely impaired.

Not all errors are displayed as such. However, admins should see messages in the log files that indicate a date error. SonicWall has already published the first patches that fix the problems related to the latest Microsoft Y2K22 Exchange Server bug. The cybersecurity firm identified the following issues administrators and users of its email security products faced during the Y2K22 crisis:

SonicWall Support Notice

As of January 1, 2022, SonicWall Email Security products began to experience an issue that caused junk box and message log updates to fail. Administrators and email users face two problems:

• It is not possible to access the junk box or remove new emails from the junk.
• It is not possible to track incoming and outgoing e-mail through the message logs.

Y2K22 at Microsoft

The Y2K22 error is based on a massive problem with date processing in various software products. The new date value starting at “2.201.010.001” exceeds what the servers can handle with the current Int32 data type. As a result, the malware inspection engine crashed, leaving e-mail and messages in the “transport queues” of Exchange servers. According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 were affected.