Cyber intellect worm “Flame” came up to notice of the experts first time at Kaspersky Lab when a specialized agency of UN “International Telecommunication Union” (in charge of information and communiqué technologies) approaches to these experts for assistance in finding an unfamiliar and mysterious malware. The Flame as a powerful computer virus has removed the highly sensitive information all over the Middle East; especially it has affected the Iran mainly. The way to spread out in systems of this virus is very mysterious because it is intelligent enough to disturb the computers systems by spreading rapidly and without coming into the notice of the computer users. Nobody is fully clear in mind till now about, how this malware is being communicated. Anyway, the list of affected countries is included: Iran, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, and Lebanon.
There is no definite date of Flame creation to be expressed but according to expert’s estimation, it is not before than the year 2010. The Flame is illustrated as one amongst the most dangerous with influential traits malware. According to some experts, it serves in the same way as Stuxnet virus has been served up by disabling the nuclear facilities of Iran, previously.
Flame’s Way to Attack:
The Flame virus is considered very damaging due to deviation in its facts and figures gathering manners. You can better understand its strength by knowing that it is able to take screenshots and can record the audio using the system microphone. Besides this, this virus can get access to nearby peripherals and devices with the help of Bluetooth technology. On the other hand, other malware can just attack via email or can be used maliciously for stealing money, etc. But this sophisticated toolkit for assault is really serious and complex threat to the security of businesses computer networks and even for the different countries secrets information’s security too for the reason of its several dangerous possibilities.
Flame is a name of huge programmed modules package with about 20 MB mass when it is fully installed on the system. The Flame is consisted of different libraries (zlib, ppmd, libbz2, and sqlite3, etc) and that is its big size reason too. Many modules of Flame virus are written in Lua (a scripting language). For your information, Lua usage in malware is not common. The reason is just coding large size. The current malware are being written using compact programming languages. That is because; small sized coding is able to be hiding easily. You can say, Flame is one of the biggest threats that ever discovered due to its certain new features like its audio recording ability. It can record audio data with the assistance of computer’s internal microphone. Moreover, Flame is able to gather data and facts about detectable devices close to the infected system when Bluetooth is on.
There are also lots of built-in but different timers possible into the Flame virus. The function of these timers is to monitor the connections accomplishment to C&C and to keep an eye on definite data theft operation’s frequency, etc.