Webopedia Term of the Day: What is Flame (malware)?

An extremely sophisticated strain of malware that shares similarities with Stuxnet, although Flame is much more massive in terms of complexity and size, at 30MB or larger when all modules have been installed vs. Stuxnet’s 500KB. Also known as Flamer or Skywiper, Flame was discovered by Kaspersky Lab following a significant increase in infected systems in Iran and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa over the past two years.

After infecting a computer or device, Flame spies on the machine’s activity and steals data from it with keystroke monitoring and packet sniffing functionality as well as backdoor capabilities that enable cyber attackers to update the malware and trigger it or erase it as desired. The Flame malware features multiple levels of encryption as well as more than 20 different modules and plug-ins that can be swapped in and out for added functionality. One unique characteristic of Flame is that some of its code has been written in LUA, a programming language typically used for developing games rather than malware.