Matthew 24:6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
<em>Editor’s Note: In May 2011, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Pentagon: Cyber Attacks Can Count as Acts of War.” The article began, “The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.”</em>
A targeted cyber attack has been discovered that was collecting sensitive information from nations like Israel according to researchers from Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs.
The company said the attack was state-sponsored but could not be completely sure of the exact country of origin.
The attack, called Flame, appears not to cause damage to the machines it infects so most users are not aware of the infection.
“Once a system is infected,” Kaspersky’s chief malware expert told the BBC, “Flame begins a complex set of operations, including sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard and so on.”
In addition to Israel, the malware targeted government computers in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan.
Kaspersky reports that it first recorded an instance of the malware in August 2010 but states it’s likely the program had been running before that date.
A professor from the University of Surrey told the BBC the program is basically “an industrial vacuum cleaner for sensitive information.” Once a machine is infected, Flame would add additional modules to perform other tasks in a similar manner to adding an app to a smartphone.
