A rather elaborate cyber-security attack has been gobbling up private data in Israel and Iran. Security folks at Kaspersky Labs report that Flame, as it’s being called (after the word appears often in the coding), has been operating since at least 2010 and that it’s larger and more far-reaching than Stuxnet or Duqu, two previous worms. It appears to originate from some government although Kaspersky can’t yet tell who or won’t say, and we don’t like to pry.

Some other differences as reported by the BBC:

This new threat appears not to cause physical damage, but to collect huge amounts of sensitive information, said Kaspersky’s chief malware expert Vitaly Kamluk.

“Once a system is infected, Flame begins a complex set of operations, including sniffing the network traffic, taking screenshots, recording audio conversations, intercepting the keyboard, and so on,” he said.