"Flame" virus strikes!!

The biggest cyber espionage has been detected hitting the Middle East and Iran yesterday. Kaspersky has termed it to be one of the most sophisticated data stealing cyber weapon lurking today. It has been termed as an even greater decapitator than the feared “Stuxnet” and “Duqu” viruses. The Flame virus is much advanced in complexity and in terms of size, it is over 20 Megabytes and it will ideally take over a year for a complete analysis of this malware program.

It’s also quite unique in the way it steals information. It’s possible to steal different types of information with the help of this spyware tool. It can record audio if a microphone is attached to the infected system (It activates the microphone automatically), it can do screen captures and transmit visual data.

 It can steal information from the input boxes when they are hidden behind asterisks, password fields; it can get information from there. Also it can scan for locally visible Bluetooth devices if there is a Bluetooth adapter attached to the local system. Flame is the third major cyber weapon discovered in the past two years, and Kaspersky's conclusion that it was crafted at the behest of a national government fueled speculation that the virus could be part of an Israeli-backed campaign of electronic sabotage aimed at arch rival Iran.

Although their coding is different, Kaspersky states there was some evidence to suggest that the people behind Flame also helped craft Stuxnet, a notorious virus that disrupted controls of some nuclear centrifuges in Iran in 2010. Flame has so far, attacked hundreds of computers and wiped their hard drives, making the systems unbootable after that. Kaspersky chanced upon the Flame virus when they were investigating the dubious Malware attacks in the Middle East region at the behest of the UN. Although, Kaspersky has confirmed that this virus may be stealing data and wreaking havoc for almost a year now.