Fortinet Protects Against Latest Sober Variant W32/Sober.M-mm

SUNNYVALE, Calif.,March 07, 2005 - Fortinet - the confirmed market leader in Unified Threat Management (UTM) and only provider of ASIC-accelerated, network-based antivirus firewall systems for real-time network protection - today announced that its FortiGate™ systems and FortiClient Host Security software protect against the latest Sober variant, W32/Sober.M-mm, also known as Sober.L. A mass-mailer that follows the footsteps of previous Sober variants in style and function, W32/Sober.M-mm, targets email recipients by harvesting addresses from an infected system and then sends emails with a viral attachment. The mail attachments have a .PIF or .ZIP extension. Fortinet currently rates the latest Sober variant a Level Two worm, but notes it has the potential to be a higher threat in the future.

Visible symptoms of the latest Sober variant, W32/Sober.M-mm, include:

• Possible firewall alert that a file "smss.exe" is attempting to access the Internet using DNS
• Newly created "System" folder in the %windows%\msagent folder
• Newly created files on the infected system in the System32 folder

FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically through Fortinet's family of FortiGuard™ subscription updates, which ensure 24x7 protection against the latest viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and other threats. To protect customers against W32/Sober.M-mm, Fortinet published antivirus database 4.618 for its worldwide FortiGate systems and FortiClient Host Security software less than two hours after receiving the first virus sample. With this latest antivirus database update, Fortinet's FortiGate systems can block the infectious email attachment at the gateway before it enters customers' networks, or on the host with the FortiClient Host Software.

For more information on W32/Sober.M-mm, visit Fortinet's FortiProtect Center at:
http://www.fortinet.com/VirusEncyclopedia/search/encyclopediaSearch.do?method=viewVirusDetailsInfoDirectly&fid=30603

For more information about Fortinet's FortiGate systems and FortiClient Host Security software, please visit: http://www.fortinet.com/products/

About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the confirmed leader of Unified Threat Management market. The company's award-winning FortiGate™ series of ASIC-accelerated antivirus firewalls, winner of the 2004 Security Product of the Year Award from Network Computing Magazine and the 2003 Networking Industry Awards Firewall Product of the Year, are the new generation of real-time network protection systems. They detect and eliminate the most damaging, content-based threats from e-mail and Web traffic such as viruses, worms, intrusions, inappropriate Web content and more in real time - without degrading network performance. FortiGate systems are the only security products that are quadruple-certified by the ICSA (antivirus, firewall, IPSec, NIDS), and deliver a full range of network-level and application-level services in integrated, easily managed platforms. Named to the Red Herring Top 100 Private Companies, Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.