Flame Virus, the most powerful ever discovered: how it works

The Flame virus is the new danger running online: a lot of attention is being paid to it, as it is quite a powerful tool. Here’s how it works.

It is in these hours that the news has broken that a new computer virus, very powerful and dangerous, has been discovered: it is called Flame and it is present mainly in the Middle East.
The novelty is not so much related to its creation but rather to its discovery, given that it emerges that Flame has been acting undisturbed for at least a couple of years, without ever being detected until these days.
A couple of weeks ago it was the company Kaspersky Lab, operating in the field of IT security, that noticed and classified the virus, placing it in the category that belongs to the field of actual warfare, albeit at a cyber level.
A danger not to be underestimated, as Flame manages to “sniff” anything on the infected PC: from documents to conversations that take place via Skype, to simple browsing.
The scope is such that even devices connected to the same network – therefore, for example, tablets and smartphones – can thus be easily spied on, even if Flame is not physically stored on them.
The real problem, according to what can be read in the report released by Kaspersky Lab, is that this virus was written in LUA and in an extremely complicated way, therefore it will take several years to study it in depth, with the risk that the virus may spread extensively in the meantime.

How does Flame?
work physically? Once installed, it will lodge itself on the PC using 6 MB of space and will begin to continuously take screenshots, at regular and close intervals, in order to record any ongoing operation.
Subsequently, the virus will become increasingly “overbearing”, until it takes up 20 MB of space on the infected device, continuing to regularly monitor and save any move on the PC.
Flame is therefore born with the purpose of conducting operations within actual digital wars and it is probably no coincidence that its diffusion has occurred primarily in the Middle East and North Africa, with particular reference to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.
Getting infected by Flame is quite simple as the virus passes easily through USB flash drives, even without launching programs or applications: contagion is practically immediate.
At the moment there is no antivirus capable of blocking this powerful virus: there is still much to study given the complexity of the writing architecture.

Pubblicato in Guides & Tutorials