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Check Point security devices suffer reboot glitch

A number of Check Point security appliances simultaneously rebooted themselves on Saturday, according to an advisory from the company.The reboot glitch, which made security appliances including firewalls, antivirus and intrusion detection systems unmanageable, affected Check Point UTM-1 Edge and Safe@Office devices, said the advisory.
Written by Tom Espiner, Contributor

A number of Check Point security appliances simultaneously rebooted themselves on Saturday, according to an advisory from the company.

The reboot glitch, which made security appliances including firewalls, antivirus and intrusion detection systems unmanageable, affected Check Point UTM-1 Edge and Safe@Office devices, said the advisory.

"All of our Edges started going haywire around 7:00 p.m. CDT with a kind of cascading failure where they would no longer respond to pings and the GUI was inaccessible," said a user on the Check Point UTM-1 forum. "Then they all rebooted about 8:58 p.m. CDT. Very scary episode."

The appliances were unresponsive for various lengths of time on Saturday night/Sunday morning, according to the Check Point User Group forum. The switchover to daylight savings time in Europe was not the cause of the bug, according to a post on the forum.

"For everyone in the Americas concerned this problem will affect them next weekend as well, the issue has nothing to do with Daylight Saving Time," said the post. "The fact this bug occurred around the Daylight Saving Time switchover for Europe was coincidental."

Check Point said that the problem had been caused by a specific counter that elapsed every 13.6 years.

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