SonicWall Capture Service is Finding, Stopping More than 1,000 New Unique Malware Variants Each Day — A 524 Percent Growth in the Last Six Months

PRESS RELEASE – October 4, 2017

Cloud-Based, Multi-Engine Capture Sandbox Sees New Customer Signups Surge 55 Percent; Service Activation Up 104 Percent Among Existing Customers

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – SonicWall, the trusted security partner protecting more than 1 million networks worldwide, announced today that its Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service — a cloud-based, multi-engine network security sandbox — achieved tremendous success in finding and stopping new malware variants and drove dramatic second-quarter customer growth.

These results are driven by the enhanced performance and proven ability of SonicWall Capture to mitigate both known and unknown cyber attacks in real time. Following two of the most recent high-profile global attacks — WannaCry and NotPetya — SonicWall credits Capture ATP with protecting Capture-enabled customer networks from malicious zero-day attacks.

“Organizations are faced with a complex and ever-evolving threat landscape, including a daily deluge of thousands of new ‘malware cocktails’ that remix ingredients into new and more devastating attacks,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “SonicWall Capture ATP has proven time and again that it not only identifies new variants, but also safely contains and stops zero-day attacks. After seeing the devastating effects of WannaCry and NotPetya — and now breaches at Equifax and Deloitte — customers are increasingly responsive to solutions like Capture, which offers sophisticated and automated threat protection.”

Achieving Strong Double-Digit Attach Rate Growth
In the second quarter (FY18), the SonicWall Capture ATP service:

• Reported a 77 percent increase in licenses sold over Q1
• Gained popularity with net-new customers, driving a 55 percent increase in attach rate over the prior quarter
• Saw a 104 percent increase in existing customer attach rates, as they move to better protect their networks and businesses

Detecting and Protecting Against Never-Before-Seen Malware Variants

In the wake of WannaCry and NotPetya, Capture ATP continues to register an increasing amount of chaotic and suspicious malware activity across its 1 million networks worldwide. Data recorded and analyzed indicates that there are as many as 1,000 or more new variants that threaten SonicWall customer networks each business day. Capture ATP is successfully detecting and stopping new malware variants — including evolving WannaCry and NotPetya strands — from penetrating customer networks.

From a second-quarter threat perspective, the SonicWall Capture ATP service:

• Reported 524 percent growth in the number of unique variants identified in the last six months
• Experienced a 57 percent increase in the number of malicious files reviewed in daily traffic
• Protected customer networks from WannaCry and NotPetya

“SonicWall Capture is fundamental to providing our customers with the necessary level of security that they require to protect their businesses and their brands,” said Jason Hill, Security Sales Director at Exertis, a leading SonicWall distributor in the UK.

A June 2017 report from Osterman Research found that about 22 percent of small businesses with less than 1,000 employees experienced a ransomware attack that forced the closure of the business. Further, according to the Ponemon Institute’s 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million.

“The hard truth is that survival for all businesses, and especially small businesses, is on the line when the average data security incident costs millions of dollars,” said Conner.

To protect customers against the increasing dangers of zero-day threats, SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection — a cloud-based subscription service available with SonicWall firewalls — detects and blocks advanced threats at the gateway until a verdict is reached.

“SonicWall Capture is an integral part of any security project that we implement with our customers,” said Solved.IT CEO Vinny Booth, a SonicWall Gold Partner in the UK. “Malware isn’t prejudice and attacks organizations of any size with zero remorse. Demonstrating how we defend organizations against these attacks using SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection helps position us as a proactive cyber security partner that’s committed to the safety of our customers.”

Capture is the first advanced threat-detection offering that uses multi-layer sandboxing, including full system emulation and virtualization techniques, to analyze suspicious code behavior and block until verdict. This powerful combination detects more threats than single-engine sandbox solutions, which are compute-environment specific and susceptible to evasion.

“You don’t have to look that far to see the impact that malware and ransomware attacks have on businesses of all sizes,” said Boughey Distribution network administrator Paul Brough, a SonicWall and Solved.IT customer in the UK. “SonicWall Capture provides us with more peace of mind in this ever-changing threat landscape.”

Capture ATP scans traffic and extracts suspicious code to analyze a broad range of file sizes and types. The SonicWall Capture Labs global threat intelligence infrastructure rapidly deploys remediation signatures for newly identified threats to all SonicWall network security appliances, thus preventing further infiltration.

To learn more about Capture ATP, please visit sonicwall.com/capture.

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About SonicWall
SonicWall has been fighting the cyber-criminal industry for over 25 years defending small, medium-size businesses and enterprises worldwide. Backed by research from SonicWall Capture Labs, our award-winning real-time breach detection and prevention solutions coupled with the formidable resources of over 18,000 loyal channel partners around the globe, are the backbone securing more than a million business and mobile networks and their emails, applications, and data. This combination of products and partners has enabled an automated real-time breach detection and prevention solution tuned to the specific needs of the more than 500,000 organizations in over 150 countries. These businesses can run more effectively and fear less about security. For more information, visit www.sonicwall.com.