Hints Israel was behind virus attack

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JERUSALEM, May 29 (UPI) -- Israel may have been involved in the Flame worm that attacked computers in Iran and the West Bank, an Israeli government official hinted Tuesday.

Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon told an interviewer that anyone who sees Iran as a meaningful threat "would take various measures, including this one," Arutz Sheva reported.

"Israel has been blessed with being a state rich in top level high-tech," Ya'alon said. "These tools that we take pride in open up various possibilities for us."

Experts at the Internet security company Kaspersky, who first detected the virus, called Flame a "masterpiece of programming," Haaretz reported.

A spokesman said the program was sophisticated enough to change its characteristics and develop according to orders.

Flame is capable of transferring files, screenshots, audio recordings and keystrokes from infected computers, Kaspersky's representative in Israel said.

Ilan Proimovich said Flame shared certain characteristics with the Stuxnet bug that attacked Iranian centrifuges in 2010.

But Flame, unlike Stuxnet, was designed to collect information, not cause damage, Proimovich said.