Despite its complexity and sophisticated program, Iran says it has developed tools that can defend against the malicious malware known as Flame

Despite its complexity and sophisticated program, Iran says it has developed tools that can defend against the malicious malware known as Flame.

Iran announced its home-grown defense could both spot when Flame is present and clean up infected PCs. Iran's National Computer Emergency Response Team (Maher) said in a statement that the detection and clean-up tool was finished in early May and is now ready for distribution to organizations at risk of infection.

Map showing the number and geographical location of Flame infections detected by Kaspersky Lab on customer machines

The malware, discovered by Russia-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.

The Kaspersky Lab has announced that the worm is the most malicious ever and is designed to gather intelligence, adding that it can turn on PC microphones to record conversations taking place near the computer, take screenshots, log instant messaging chats, gather data files, and remotely change settings on computers.

"The complexity and functionality of the newly discovered malicious program exceed those of all other cyber menaces known to date," said the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, adding that a government or a coalition of states must be behind it. Its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals.

Stuxnet -- discovered in 2010 -- was also a computer worm. It targeted Siemens industrial software and equipment in several countries. "It took us half-a-year to analyze Stuxnet," Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab, said. "This is 20-times more complicated. It will take us 10 years to fully understand everything."

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon has strongly hinted that Israel was involved in creating the computer virus Flame.

Speaking in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio on Tuesday, Ya'alon expressed support for the creation of the virus and similar tools, saying it "opens up all kinds of possibilities.”

He also noted that it is reasonable for anyone who sees Iran as a threat to take such steps, saying that "whoever sees the Iranian threat as a serious threat would be likely to take different steps, including these, in order to hurt them."