The 21st century has brought about a technological revolution that has also changed the strategy in how wars are fought. Not only is the US using Predator Drones kill people remotely, but they’ve also been using hackers to fight Iran in cyberspace. Their most recent virus, “Flame” was discovered in Iranian computers and across the Middle East. According to Business Insider:
“Flame is a massive program that leaves a backdoor (i.e. Trojan) on computers through which it sucks information from networks by actions including recording keystrokes, capturing screen images, remotely change settings on computers, turning every computer into a listening device and using Bluetooth to gather data from nearby cell phones and tablets.
The 20 megabyte virus was first discovered over the weekend by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab after a U.N. telecommunications agency asked it to analyze data on malicious software across the Middle East after Iranian reports of a data-wiping virus, according to Reuters .
The highest concentrations of compromised computers were found in Iran, followed by the Palestinian West Bank, Israel, Sudan, Syria and Lebanon . Additional infections have been reported in Hungary, Austria, Russia, Hong Kong , and the United Arab Emirates.
Kaspersky researchers told The New York Times that Flame shares notable features with the Duqu and Stuxnet malware, including exploiting the same flaw in the Windows operating system and that they believe all three viruses were written by the same state-sponsored campaign.”
