'Flame' Fans Notion Of More Weapons Yet To Be Found

It's big -- 20 times the size of Stuxnet -- and it's stealthy -- operating undetected for years -- but the newly discovered Flame cyberespionage malware at its core is really just next-generation spyware.

This latest cyberweapon, which has the earmarks of a well-funded nation-state, further confirms suspicions that there are still other such attacks out there stealing information in the shadows that we can't see, security experts say. Flame doesn't use the same codebase as Stuxnet or Duqu, but there are some haunting parallels, including Iran as a prime target, a modular design akin to Duqu's, and that Flame uses the same exploits Stuxnet did. But Flame appears so far to be good old-fashioned espionage: It steals documents, takes screenshots of the victim's machine, records Skype calls, and snoops on email and instant messaging sessions.

Security researchers worldwide had a memorable Memorial Day yesterday when word got out that the new information-siphoning Trojan with worm features, known as Flame or Flamer, had been discovered infecting Windows machines in Iran, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria. Iran's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) said in a post that Iranian PCs had been targeted and infected by Flame, and said that it had written and distributed a detection tool to "selected organizations and companies" in early May, and that it now had a removal capability as well.

In a rare move, the Iranian CERT also reached out to some members of the antivirus community with information on Flame. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, whose company had been contacted by the Iranian CERT, says he was indeed surprised to hear from them. "They emailed us, promising additional info after we had exchanged encryption keys. We sent our keys and haven't heard from them since," Hypponen says.

Chris Wysopal, CTO at Veracode, says Flame does some of the same basic things that the Back Orifice spyware did back in 1998, and BO2K, for example, such as keystroke-grabbing, screenshot-recording, and extracting files. "That's like run-of-the-mill spyware from 12 to 14 years ago," he says.

Flame adds a few modern-day twists to the spyware theme, with the ability to use a victim's Bluetooth feature to send commands to it, for example. Yet it's not necessarily about what Flame does, but how the malware is written and structured, security researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Symantec who have studied Flame samples say.

"The way the malware was structured really shows a high level of professionalism -- they have their own libraries to handle SSL, SSH, and there's a lot of data into SQL databases," says Roel Schouwenberg, senior antivirus researcher for Kaspersky Lab.

Flame's operation is unique and advanced as well. "It's very conservative in how it spreads. It only spreads via a USB or network after the attacker instructs it to do so. It may only spread once," Schouwenberg says. "And the vast majority of infections out there are actual intended targets. This isn't Stuxnet, where we saw tens of thousands of infections globally and only a handful that mattered."

That points to some serious manpower to review and manage all of the audio and other data captured, he says. It's also infecting more targets than Duqu, which went after about 50 organizations worldwide. Flame appears to be going after hundreds of different targets, and Kaspersky expects the numbers to reach more than 1,000 when all is said and done.

Given Flame's modular architecture, there could be more components out for more than just espionage, too, experts say. "Right now, all we're seeing is the cyberespionage part. But we're operating under the assumption that we haven't uncovered all of the modules out there," Kaspersky's Schouwenberg says. "It's very possible and plausible that there's a module out there that would be responsible for interacting with industrial control systems ... maybe even part of sabotage."

And Stuxnet/Duqu and Flame could be parallel efforts by the same actors, experts say. "It looks like two teams were contracted to do the same thing ... maybe for redundancy," Schouwenberg says. "The fact that they share unique exploits between them very strongly suggests a link between them."

The Budapest University of Technology and Economics' Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySys), echoed that in its analysis of Flame (PDF): "We cannot exclude the possibility that the attackers hired multiple independent development teams for the same purpose, and sKyWIper and Duqu are two independent implementations developed for the same requirement specifications."

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