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SONICWALL TO OFFER INTRUSION DETECTION AND PREVENTION CAPABILITIES ACROSS PRODUCT LINE - SUNNYVALE, Calif. - February 24, 2004.

SonicWALL, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNWL), a leading provider of integrated security, productivity and mobility solutions, today announced that a full-featured Intrusion Prevention Service will be available as a yearly subscription for the TZ 170 and PRO 2040, PRO 3060, PRO 4060, and PRO 5060 platforms. This new technology will deliver a configurable, high performance stateful deep packet inspection engine for extended protection to key Internet services such as Web, e-mail, file transfer, Windows services, and DNS. This enhances the payload inspection technology currently driving SonicWALL's Complete Anti-Virus rapid e-mail attachment blocking and SonicWALL's Content Filtering Service. The new capabilities are designed to protect against known buffer overflow vulnerabilities in software, as well as various worms, Trojans, and peer-to-peer, spyware and backdoor exploits. The extensible signature language used in the deep packet inspection engine will provide a proactive defense against newly discovered application vulnerabilities.

"Once again, SonicWALL has taken a key technology advance-previously expensive and with limited availability-and integrated it into easy-to-use, cost-effective, and widely available platforms for the broader market," noted Douglas Brockett, SonicWALL's vice president of worldwide marketing. "SonicWALL's customers have come to expect nothing less than value innovation in our products, as we offer easily-deployed, highly relevant technology when our customers need it, at a price they can afford."

Malicious attacks targeting application vulnerabilities have been plaguing networks since Nimda and Code Red in 2001 and SQL Slammer and MS Blaster in 2003 infected computers worldwide. Costs associated with these attacks grew to over $50 billion last year alone. More recently, threats have come from the use of peer-to-peer and instant messenger applications, including the recent Mydoom virus, which was propagated through the file sharing application Kazaa as well as through e-mail. Changes in the method and delivery of attacks have led to the need to enhance the detection and prevention capabilities of the firewall protecting the network at the perimeter.

"We've successfully offered our customers aggressive protection from these threats with the current SonicWALL security platform. For example, SonicWALL's rapid e-mail attachment blocking technology is a very strong first line of defense before new virus signatures are even available," said Deepak Thadani, president of SysIntegrators LLC., SonicWALL's Medallion Gold Partner in the New York metro area. "After testing the new Intrusion Prevention Service, I can't wait to offer this functionality to my customers! The intrusion detection and protection capability, coupled with SonicWALL's already superior feature set, will add yet another layer of protection to our customers' networks by proactively identifying and stopping suspicious traffic without the performance deterioration associated with other available solutions. We are very pleased to see that SonicWALL is continuing to expand the capabilities of its security architecture by adding the latest technologies that offer us a high return on our network investment."

The SonicOS security engine currently recognizes and protects against various traffic anomalies, port scanning reconnaissance activities, various packet level intrusion and Denial of Service attacks, as well as actively blocking forbidden, unwanted, or malicious URLs and Web-based content, including spyware, cookies, ActiveX, and Java archives. In addition, the security engine works in conjunction with dynamic security service updates from SonicWALL to provide real-time deep packet inspection blocking of malicious e-mail.

Features of the new Intrusion Prevention Service include:

Deep Packet Inspection Engine - SonicWALL's unique deep packet inspection engine provides a single-pass, parallel-matching capability by maintaining stream context across packets without needing to resort to full TCP reassembly. The result is greater processor and memory efficiency and higher throughput.

Signature Database - The SonicWALL Intrusion Prevention Services ships with over 1,700 stateful signatures that detect and prevent against application exploits, vulnerabilities, worms and network attacks in over 50 protocols, providing comprehensive protection from malicious attacks. Additional signature categories include the ability to block popular instant messenger and peer-to-peer applications from traversing the SonicWALL appliance.

Signature Updates - Signatures of new exploits, vulnerabilities, worms and attacks are automatically downloaded to the SonicWALL appliance through SonicWALL's distributed enforcement architecture for all customers with an active subscription. The distributed enforcement architecture reduces the total cost of managing an Intrusion Prevention deployment by ensuring that signatures are always up to date.

Policy Management - The SonicWALL Intrusion Prevention Service simplifies deployment and management through pre-configured global policies and grouping of attacks by priority. In addition, the policy includes granular configurability to remove false positives by allowing signatures to be individually set to detect and/or prevent.

Central Management - The SonicWALL Intrusion Prevention Service is centrally managed through the SonicWALL Global Management System. This award-winning management capability eases the total cost of ongoing management of Intrusion Prevention deployments spanning multiple locations, such as branch offices, tele-workers, remote offices, retail stores, or medical clinics. Policies are centrally created and deployed to all remote SonicWALL appliances, ensuring all remote locations are protected from attacks and compliant with the corporate policy.

The SonicWALL Intrusion Prevention Service will be available on the SonicWALL TZ 170 and PRO 2040, 3060, 4060, and 5060 models in Q2, 2004. Pricing starts at $500 per year per appliance.

About SonicWALL, Inc. - SonicWALL, Inc. is a leading provider of integrated network security, mobility, and productivity solutions for the SMB, enterprise, e-commerce, education, healthcare, retail/point-of-sale, and government markets. Core technologies include firewall, VPN, wireless, SSL, anti-virus, and content filtering, along with award-winning security management solutions. Together, these products and technologies provide the most comprehensive Distributed Security Architecture available. SonicWALL, Inc. is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. SonicWALL trades on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol SNWL. For more information, contact SonicWALL at 408-745-9600 or visit the company web site at http://www.sonicwall.com/.

For Additional Information Contact:

Allison Wagda, SonicWALL, Inc. +1 408.962.8162, awagda@sonicwall.com

Cathy Summers, SHIFT Communications +1 415.591.8415, csummers@shiftcomm.com

Safe Harbor Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the schedule for the introduction of intrusion detection and prevention capabilities of our products, the schedule of availability of intrusion detection and prevention services, the ability of our products to provide the expected return on investment to our customers, the business advantages provided by virtual private networks, and the technological capabilities and reliability of our products. These forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the time the statements are made and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. In addition, please see the "Risk Factors" described in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2002 and Form 10-Q for subsequent periods, for a more detailed description of the risks facing our business. All forward-looking statements included in this release are based upon information available to SonicWALL as of the date of the release, and we assume no obligation to update any such forward-looking statement.

NOTE: SonicWALL is a registered trademark of SonicWALL, Inc. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.