‘Flame’ Cyber-Weapon Lurked for Years

The Flame “super-malware” must have been infecting computers for as long as four years and was less invisible to antivirus software than assumed, an analysis by security company AlienVault has concluded.

On the face of its AlienVault’s analysis is just another forensic guess after peering at the important mssecmgr.ocx Win32 PE (portable executable) file, which ‘exports’ a clutch of progamming functions. As pulled apart by the Hungarian CrySys Lab, this contains debug entries suggesting a 2011 creation date.