SonicWALL announces Patrick Sweeney, VP of Product Management and its resident expert on VoIP and video technologies, is available for comment about the threats associated with VoIP and video transmissions. He is also available to discuss the emerging requirements to control bandwidth and prioritize business critical applications as converged networks continue to grow. If interested, he can comment on the recent attempts by certain governments to control VoIP use.

The mainstream use of digital telephony by businesses is growing. Businesses large and now small are turning to VoIP and video to reduce expenses, simplify telephony administration, increase collaboration and improve productivity. Nevertheless, this switch also carries dangerous side effects. Because packet-based voice and video is only effective in real-time, quality of service interruptions, hackers and--sometimes even political leaders -- can increase message latency, jitter, packet loss and echo that either makes the communication unintelligible or blocks it. Each day employees download large files such as streaming audio and video or collaborate using video conferencing making bandwidth prioritization critical for conducting business.

Sweeney is available to talk about the security and technical issues, as well as the political implications of these actions that can include:

• Denial of Service (DoS) attacks causing VoIP services to fail
• Directory Harvesting entailing hackers using brute force to search for VoIP on a network
• Eavesdropping using man in the middle attaches spoofing the MAC address of two users forcing the VoIP packets hackers force the packets to pass through their system for eavesdropping
• Registration Hijacking where hackers get the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), disable a valid user's SIP registration, and substitute it with their IP address
• Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) produced by botnets using compromised systems to target millions of VoIP users.
• Vishing (Voice Phishing) seeking to make users disclose sensitive or personal information for identity theft
• Voice Service Theft involving unauthorized users who get access to a VoIP network

Recent examples of government intervention include: a coalition of government forces in Russia against the use of VoIP, South Korea's interference with VoIP transmissions and Costa Rica's objection to installing VoIP in the country.

Because of these emerging VoIP threats, an ideal solution delivers comprehensive protection against VoIP and video security threats, while providing the bandwidth and prioritization tools needed to optimize quality of service, says Sweeney..

BIO:         SonicWALL Vice President, Product Management Patrick Sweeney
             Patrick Sweeney is SonicWALL's Vice President, Product
             Management for all SonicWALL Business Units. With more than
             20 years of software development and product management
             experience, his current focus at SonicWALL is developing
             products that keep networks secure and wipe out the scourge
             of spam and phishing from inboxes, digital telephony and
             video everywhere.

WHAT:        Sweeney is available to discuss packet manipulation trends in
             VoIP and video technology and the potential political issues
             spawned by hackers and dictators working together in
             countries like China and Belize.

RESOURCE:    Easily managed and highly cost-effective, SonicWALL Converged
             Network Security solutions offer a high performance, multi-
             layered security approach that also maintains quality of
             service for time-sensitive voice and video applications.
             Further, all VoIP traffic between third-party VoIP telephony
             devices can be easily configured to traverse any SonicWALL
             Secure Remote Access solution.