The Washington Post is reporting that the recently-discovered Flame virus was jointly produced by the United States and Israel.
The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage aimed at slowing Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort.
The massive piece of malware secretly mapped and monitored Iran’s computer networks, sending back a steady stream of intelligence to prepare for a cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials.
This is what most of us believed, I think; all this story really adds is off-the-record confirmation.
It isn’t difficult to understand the appeal of this sort of mischief; after all, it’s relatively cheap and nobody dies. But the ability to insert a virus that seizes control of industrial hardware is something new, something thought impossible by most industrial security experts just 2-years ago, and it verges on actual negligence that neither the US nor Israel seems to have considered the possibility that the code might be discovered, reverse engineered, and used against us.
