Creators Push The Self-Destruct Button On Flame Virus

The infamous Flame Virus which affected a major number of users in Middle East, especially Iran, has received orders to shut down. The news of Virus surfaced last week, with many cyber-security experts describing it as one of the most thought out attacks of all time. The spy malware operates by presenting a fake digital certificate cheating the the user by posing as a code generated by a trusted source.

Considered to be even more lethal than the Stuxnet, after the attack was revealed, Eugene Kaspersky issued a warning to people to take cyber-terrorism more seriously as it can be the end of world as we know it. Flame virus is capable of recording audio via a microphone, taking screen shots and using Bluetooth connection to extract phone numbers and data from other Bluetooth enabled computers. The virus targets a specific cybersecurity algorithm known as the Message-Digest algorithm 5. MD5 is responsible for taking a unique piece of data and converting into a digital fingerprint or hash.

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Hash cannot be reverse-engineered to find the original password but can be used to match to its hash and verify it. By trying for pairs of data which would result in identical hashes, an attacker can take advantage of the collision and intercept communication. This kind of chosen-prefix collision attack was used to drive the Flame virus.

On Sunday, researchers reported that the Flame Virus had been given orders to vanish. The self-destruct command was sent after news of Flame Virus spread and investigations had commenced. The self-destruct command led the infected computers to delete an array of files and subsequently, cram disks with random characters so as to prohibit the recovery of original code.

It is still unknown how many computers have received the self-destruct command.

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