BOSTON, (Reuters) – A United Nations agency charged with helping member nations secure their national infrastructures plans to issue a sharp warning about the risk of the Flame computer virus that was recently discovered in Iran and other parts of the Middle East.
“This is the most serious (cyber) warning we have ever put out,” said Marco Obiso, cyber security coordinator for the U.N.’s Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union.
The confidential warning will tell member nations that the Flame virus is a dangerous espionage tool that could potentially be used to attack critical infrastructure, he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
“They should be on alert,” he said, adding that he believed Flame was likely built on behalf of a nation state.
The warning is the latest signal that a new era of cyber warfare has begun following the 2010 Stuxnet virus attack that targeted Iran’s nuclear program. The United States explicitly stated for the first time last year that it reserved the right to retaliate with force against a cyber attack.
Evidence suggests that the Flame virus may have been built on behalf of the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that took credit for discovering the infections.
“I think it is a much more serious threat than Stuxnet,” Obiso said.
He said the ITU would set up a program to collect data, including virus samples, to track Flame’s spread around the globe and observe any changes in its composition.
