By: Ken Rapoza, Forbes
Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab said that the latest malware discovery, known as the Flame, is not only similar to the Stuxnet worm that infiltrated Iranian nuclear power plants in 2010, it was more than likely created by the same entities.
Stuxnet was revealed as a U.S. cyber security weapon by The New York Times earlier this month. Cyber security firms have said that the U.S. worked closely with Israel to develop the virus that ultimately shut down Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities before network analysts there were finally able to remove it from their computer systems.
On Monday, Kaspersky Lab chief analyst Alexander Gostev said that they were wrong in their earlier assessment that Flame source code patterns were based on what Russian researchers called the “Tilded” platform, which Stuxnet came from. The conventional platform design for Stuxnet was called ‘Tilded’ because the code’s authors were inclined to use file names which often started with “~d”.