Antivirus company, Kaspersky Lab, is confident that the malicious Flame virus that harvests information from infected machines, including keyboard and storage devices could be brought under control.

“In collaboration with GoDaddy and OpenDNS, we have succeeded in sinkholing most of the malicious domains used by the Flame’s command and control (C&C) infrastructure,” said Kaspersky.

“The Flame C&C infrastructure, which had been operating for years, went offline immediately after Kaspersky Lab disclosed the discovery of the malware’s existence last week.”

Kaspersky Lab’s experts discovered the virus during an investigation prompted by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and the analysis of the malicious program revealed it was the largest and most
complex attack toolkit to date.

The company announced that the highly sophisticated malicious programme, was actively being used as a cyber weapon targeting entities in several countries, some in Africa.

Aleks Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab told ITWeb, Flame is currently deployed in the Middle East by unknown perpetrators. He also said it is undoubtedly the most complex threat discovered to date.

“It's big and incredibly sophisticated. It pretty much redefines the notion of cyber war and cyber espionage,” he said.