UN Agency Plans Major Warning on Flame Virus Risk
Published:
Wednesday, 30 May 2012 | 6:43 AM ET
By: Reuters
A
United Nations agency charged with helping member nations secure their
national infrastructures plans to issue a sharp warning about the risk
of the Flame computer virus that was recently discovered in Iran and
other parts of the Middle East.
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The
confidential warning will tell member nations that the Flame virus is a
dangerous espionage tool that could potentially be used to attack
critical infrastructure, he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
"They should be on alert," he said, adding that he believed Flame was likely built on behalf of a nation state.
The
warning is the latest signal that a new era of cyber warfare has begun
following the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack that targeted Iran's nuclear
program.
The United States explicitly stated for the first time last year that it reserved the right to retaliate with force against a cyber attack.
Evidence
suggests that the Flame virus may have been built on behalf of the same
nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked
Iran's nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that took credit for discovering the infections.
He
said the ITU would set up a program to collect data, including virus
samples, to track Flame's spread around the globe and observe any
changes in its composition.
Kaspersky
Lab said it found the Flame infection after the ITU asked the Russian
company to investigate recent reports from Tehran that a mysterious
virus was responsible for massive data losses on some Iranian computer
systems.
So far,
the Kaspersky team has not turned up the original data-wiping virus that
they were seeking and the Iranian government has not provided Kaspersky
a sample of that software, Obiso said.
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