Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Flame was intended to steal key Iranian data

This is a Marketplace.org Reader

In other Flame news, the BBC reports that Flame seems to have been built with the express purpose of stealing data from Iranian government computers. Not just a bit of malware that happened to end up in Iran but malware specifically targeted to do very particular things.

Says the BBC:

“They were looking for the designs of mechanical and electrical equipment,” said Prof Alan Woodward, a computing specialist from the University of Surrey.
“This could be either to find out how far advanced some particular project was/is, or to steal some design(s) to sell on the black market.
“However, Iran isn’t likely to have any intellectual property not available elsewhere. So, this suggests more a case of intelligence-gathering than onward selling on the black market.”

Now, you take this news and you take the news that Stuxnet (the Flame of last year) has now been confirmed as a creation of the American government and you can reasonably conclude that the U.S. may well be behind Flame. The only mitigating factor there is that several incidences of Flame infection happened in the United States as well.

 

Latest Episodes

View All Shows
  • Marketplace Morning Report
    33 minutes ago
    7:08
  • Marketplace Tech
    6 hours ago
    11:03
  • Marketplace
    18 hours ago
    25:19
  • Make Me Smart
    a day ago
    19:00
  • This Is Uncomfortable
    3 days ago
    56:05
  • Million Bazillion
    24 days ago
    32:45