"Flame is well organized in how it communicates and translates data. In an infected machine, it can perform a variety of tasks including wiping out its own existence as well as any other malware on the machine. This is a tactic used by other sophisticated viruses – becoming their own antivirus programs – presumably because other, less sophisticated viruses could lead to the discovery of Flame itself. When Flame retrieves data, be it key logs or screen shots, it uses high- and low-level encryption and HTTPS to send data back to its command-and-control servers. That data is then organized into its database through MySQLite, a smaller version of MySQL database software." - × × ×

“In a nutshell: Flame can control almost every aspect of the computer, disappear without a trace, encrypt its own communications and organize the data it collects. That is one smart virus. ¶ It is so large and smart that researchers have concluded that this was not created by a random group of hackers looking to make some money. (Now that its code is out in the wild, though, that may be part of its future.)” - × × ×

“The results of our technical analysis supports the hypotheses that sKyWIper [Flame] was developed by a government agency of a nation state with significant budget and effort, and it may be related to cyber warfare activities,” stated a technical report from the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.” - × × ×