Eugene Kaspersky declared on Wednesday that he fully supports the fight against “cyber terrorism”. In his opinion, nations should all join forces to destroy the Flame virus; otherwise, their efforts will be in vain, Reuters relates.
Kaspersky was the first to discover the Flame virus infesting computers in the Middle East and Iran. Although the problem seems to have been solved for the moment, Eugene Kaspersky is afraid that many more cyber terrorist attacks could take place in the future.
He told Reuters reporters that the recent attacks should not be described as “cyber war”, but rather as “cyber terrorism” which is much more terrifying than the first option. The specialist further added that the “game” has just begun and numerous other virus attacks could take pace in the future. He even suggested that the world might be destroyed because of the Flame virus.
His declaration came a week after new details surfaced in relation to Flame. Based on the recent discoveries, the virus might have been built by the same nation or nations who attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 with the help of the Stuxnet worm. U.S. officials have made many more statements in relation to the work of the United States and Israel on Stuxnet to target Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.
Flame, however, could be a lot worse than Stuxnet, says Kaspersky. Experts were surprised to see how sophisticated the software is after they identified it. In fact, the virus continues to be investigated even today because analysts believe it was created to infest computers in the Middle East and Iran.
The Russian expert thinks this type of virus could be created only by tech-savvy countries, such as, China, India, Japan and Romania. These countries have all the expertise and the abilities to develop such software, but Kaspersky is not certain that these nations created Flame. Moreover, experienced engineers may be employed or kidnapped by other states, so it’s rather hard to identify the culprit.
There is but one solution to put an end to cyber terrorism and, that is, by setting the premises for global cooperation. In addition, operating systems must be redesigned to resist these attacks.
