By: Shelly Palmer, Huffington Post
While we are busy worrying about Kim Kardashian, sound bite politics and banning 64 oz. cups of sugary soft drinks, the first super-cyber weapon has been quietly spying on and attacking things it doesn't like. Huge stealthy computer viruses with capabilities that sound like the stuff of science fiction have been hard at work, collecting data and data and more data, waiting to strike. It is now clear we live in a world at war, cyber war... and this is just the beginning.
While they were busy on assignment from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), looking for something else entirely, Kaspersky Lab discovered Worm.Win32.Flame -- the world's first super-cyber weapon, which Kaspersky Lab named "Flame." What makes Flame a super-cyber weapon? Kaspersky Lab says it is highly sophisticated and malicious with complexity and functionality exceeding all other cyber weapons known to date. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty scary to me.
Kaspersky goes on to say that while "... the features of Flame differ compared with those of previous notable cyber weapons such as Duqu and Stuxnet, the geography of attacks, use of specific software vulnerabilities, and the fact that only selected computers are being targeted all indicate that Flame belongs to the same category ..." It's just more powerful, harder to detect, harder to understand, bigger and nastier than anything they've ever seen.