The command which Symantec has aptly named urgent suicide seems to have been created by the controllers of the Flame malware in light of the publicity surrounding the attack, since its reveal to the general public in May. IT company Symantec stated that some command and control machines have sent a command which causes Flame residing on machines to commit suicide. The aim of the suicide code is to completely erase Flame from the PC- apparently in an attempt to prevent anyone capturing and analysing the malware. The BBC reported that the suicide code removed Flame and then overwrote memory locations with gibberish to thwart forensic examination. It is still unclear why this new suicide code was sent out as Flame contains a suicide code within its coding which does not seem to have been activated.The complexity and sophistication of Flame is still coming to light. As an IT security threat, Flame seems to use the prefix collision attack technique which was demonstrated in 2008. This malware has been seen by experts as requiring world- class cryptanalysis to design. The complexity of the code still indicates that it was developed by a national state rather than cybercriminals. No one has yet claimed ownership of the program however.
