Watch out for next generation malware

by Dan

Trojan, autorun.inf,.exe’s and many more malware have been haunting our pc’s from long back.But they do not have much impact when it comes to a military or industrial application. What happens when a virus becomes threat in such a domain too!

FLAME is one such virus, which has 1000’s of line of code that is an extensive, data mining computer virus that is designed to steal information from the computer particularly from middle east. It is said to be have been written by different programmers, who are believed to have written other infamous but still dangerous DUQU and STUXNET .

T he former was designed to copy the blueprint of Iran’s nuclear program and the latter to attack the industrial control system and specifically calibrated to spin Iranian centrifuges out of control. This event may have political influence but it is out of our concern.

Further learning about FLAME and other two viruses that all three of them were designed on the same platform and all of them written with similar code pattern and by same group of programmers but test at different time periods.

FLAME is reconnaissance tools that take screen shot of user’s PC, records e-mail s and IM chats, it could also “turn on” microphones remotely, monitors keystrokes and network traffic. FLAME not only has the capability of transmitting over the internet but also it can spread through the Bluetooth networks by itself i.e. it could automatically get transmitted without any manual interference when it finds any network in the user’s proximity.

Malware found today are of few kilobytes in size whereas FLAME is 20Megabyte.This malware has already made its entry into high ranked officials and still making its progress. The difficulty in tracking down of the virus makes it more complex to decode and provide any anti-virus programs. Now the question that has popped in many think tanks is “How many more are there”??

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