Barracuda backdoor

[Tõnu Samuel <tonu () jes ee>]

Hello!

We have alarming case with Barracuda products here.

Customer bought Barracuda hardware years ago and paid for it. No leasing 
etc. Product is Barracuda Spam Firewall 800 which is $40k product. 
Customer also paid for not-so-cheap annual subscription fees each year.

One day their Barracuda product stopped working.

After investigating problem it came out that Barracuda reseller and 
Barracuda itself have some misunderstandings and because of this 
Barracuda not only disabled all kind of subscription services but also 
used some kind of backdoor in their products to disable product customer 
had paid long time ago.

Message was shown "Error: Activation has not been completed. Please 
activate your Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall to enable functionality. 
(Click here to activate)". Customer was blocked to make any changes in 
admin interface of product. Even more irritating was fact that admin 
wanted to see why some e-mails were lost and was denied even to see logs!

Notice - Barracuda have not just disabled some online services (which 
were paid too) but they remotely disabled hardware product which does 
not belong to them.

I think users should be warned for companies like Barracuda. As much I 
understand this is also criminal violation to sabotage some other 
company network resources.

   Tõnu

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