On 28th May 2012, Iran National CERT published a report describing a new and complex threat dubbed “Flame”. The program is being used for targeted cyber espionage in Middle Eastern countries. The report linked this newly discovered threat with the notorious Stuxnet and Duqu attacks.

Flame has advanced functionality to capture a wide variety of data in many ways. It monitors machines for useful intelligence from emails and documents, spies on network traffic to intercept sensitive data, can take screenshots when applications like instant messengers are running, captures keystrokes, records audio if a microphone is present – the list goes on.

If you suspect your computer might be affected with Flame, no need to worry Ad-Aware 10.1 has successfully detected various components of Flame during a scan test conducted by Lavasoft Malware Labs. The component of Flame was detected as Worm.Win32.Flame.

Thanks to Ad-Aware’s real-time protection system, Flame files will be blocked as soon as they are written to your disk. If your real-time protection has been disabled, a quick scan will detect and stop the active Flame components in memory while the full scan will detect the non-active components.