Cybersleuths see link between Flame, Stuxnet virus

LONDON — Cybersecurity researchers said Monday that they'd found a link between the infrastructure-wrecking cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and the recently discovered Flame virus — possibly offering a new clue about the latter's origins.

Kaspersky Labs expert Alexander Gostev said in a blog post that his company had identified a similarity between a subset of the code used in Flame and another set of code used in an early version of Stuxnet, which is believed to have been aimed at Iran's disputed nuclear program.

Kaspersky had previously said that while Flame and Stuxnet spread in similar ways, the two worked off different coding platforms.

“It turns out we were wrong,” Gostev said. “Wrong, in that we believed Flame and Stuxnet were two unrelated projects.”

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Surrey in southern England, backed Kaspersky's analysis, saying that the similarity they identified “does suggest that very early on there was some sharing” between the viruses' authors.