Flame receives its name from a module in its toolkit. Source: Wired/Kaspersky
Me culpa. Yesterday I speculated about the origins of Flame and noted at the outset that Stuxnet generally is attributed to Israel, perhaps with the United States as an accessory. In an exhaustive report published this morning, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was in fact a U.S. product, part of a cyber-sabotage program initiated in George W. Bush’s administration and greatly accelerated under Obama, starting in the new president’s first weeks in office. Though the Times says Flame was not per se part of the overall program, dubbed Olympic Games, the kind of intelligence gathering Flame was designed to do would seem consistent with Stuxnet. The first step in Stuxnet, says the Times, was to write a “beacon” program that would map out the electronic workings of the Natanz enrichment plant in detail.