Flame or sKyWIper seems to be another military grade cyber weapon, this one optimized for espionage.Flame is highly sophisticated malicious program. The worm is at least two years old, and is mainly confined to computers in the Middle East. It does not replicate and spread automatically, which is certainly so that its controllers can target it better and evade detection longer. And its espionage capabilities are pretty impressive. The analysis of the malicious program revealed it was the largest and most complex attack toolkit to date.
Flame is modular computer malware discovered in 2012 that attacks computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The program is being used for targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries. Its discovery was announced on 28 May 2012 by MAHER Center of Iranian National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Kaspersky Lab and CrySyS Lab of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The last of these stated in its report that "sKyWIper is certainly the most sophisticated malware we encountered during our practice; arguably, it is the most complex malware ever found."
Flame can spread to other systems over a local network (LAN) or via USB stick. It can record audio, screenshots, keyboard activity and network traffic. The program also records Skype conversations and can turn infected computers into Bluetooth beacons which attempt to download contact information from nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices. This data, along with locally stored documents, is sent on to one of several command and control servers that are scattered around the world. The program then awaits further instructions from these servers.
According to estimates by Kaspersky in May 2012, Flame had initially infected approximately 1,000 machines, with victims including governmental organizations, educational institutions and private individuals. At that time 65% of the infections happened in Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, with a "huge majority of targets" within Iran. Flame has also been reported in Europe and North America. Flame supports a "kill" command which wipes all traces of the malware from the computer. The initial infections of Flame stopped operating after its public exposure, and the "kill" command was sent.
Flame is an uncharacteristically large program for malware at 20 megabytes.
It is written partly in the Lua scripting language with compiled C++ code linked in, and allows other attack modules to be loaded after initial infection. The malware uses five different encryption methods and an SQLite database to store structured information. The method used to inject code into various processes is stealthy, in that the malware modules do not appear in a listing of the modules loaded into a process and malware memory pages are protected with READ, WRITE and EXECUTE permissions that make them inaccessible by user-mode applications. The internal code has few similarities with other malware, but exploits two of the same security vulnerabilties used previously by Stuxnet to infect systems. The malware determines what antivirus software is installed, then customises its own behaviour (for example, by changing the filename extensions it uses) to reduce the probability of detection by that software. Additional indicators of compromise include mutex and registry activity, such as installation of a fake audio driver which the malware uses to maintain persistence on the compromised system.
Flame is not designed to deactivate automatically, but supports a "kill" function that makes it eliminate all traces of its files and operation from a system on receipt of a module from its controllers.
Flame was signed with a fraudulent certificate purportedly from the Microsoft Enforced Licensing Intermediate PCA certificate authority. The malware authors identified a Microsoft Terminal Server Licensing Service certificate that still used the weak MD5 hashing algorithm, and produced a counterfeit certificate that was used to sign some components of the malware to make them appear to have originated from Microsoft. A successful collision attack against a certificate was previously demonstrated in 2008, but Flame implemented a new variation of the chosen-prefix collision attack.
Flame is modular computer malware discovered in 2012 that attacks computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The program is being used for targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries. Its discovery was announced on 28 May 2012 by MAHER Center of Iranian National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Kaspersky Lab and CrySyS Lab of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The last of these stated in its report that "sKyWIper is certainly the most sophisticated malware we encountered during our practice; arguably, it is the most complex malware ever found."
Flame can spread to other systems over a local network (LAN) or via USB stick. It can record audio, screenshots, keyboard activity and network traffic. The program also records Skype conversations and can turn infected computers into Bluetooth beacons which attempt to download contact information from nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices. This data, along with locally stored documents, is sent on to one of several command and control servers that are scattered around the world. The program then awaits further instructions from these servers.
According to estimates by Kaspersky in May 2012, Flame had initially infected approximately 1,000 machines, with victims including governmental organizations, educational institutions and private individuals. At that time 65% of the infections happened in Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, with a "huge majority of targets" within Iran. Flame has also been reported in Europe and North America. Flame supports a "kill" command which wipes all traces of the malware from the computer. The initial infections of Flame stopped operating after its public exposure, and the "kill" command was sent.
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| Flame / sKyWIper spread so far of the Flame virus |
Flame is not designed to deactivate automatically, but supports a "kill" function that makes it eliminate all traces of its files and operation from a system on receipt of a module from its controllers.
Flame was signed with a fraudulent certificate purportedly from the Microsoft Enforced Licensing Intermediate PCA certificate authority. The malware authors identified a Microsoft Terminal Server Licensing Service certificate that still used the weak MD5 hashing algorithm, and produced a counterfeit certificate that was used to sign some components of the malware to make them appear to have originated from Microsoft. A successful collision attack against a certificate was previously demonstrated in 2008, but Flame implemented a new variation of the chosen-prefix collision attack.
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| List of code names for various families of modules in Flame's source code and their possible purpose |
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