Kapersky Lab, a Russian producer of Anti-virus software, said Tuesday it discovered a malicious program named "Flame" that is deliberately used as a cyber weapon against entities in the Middle East.

According to Kapersky, the "highly sophisticated" malicious program is already in use for two years to steal information from infected PCs and servers. It was solely designed for espionage purposes, Kapersky Lab said in a media statement.

The Moscow-headquartered IT security company added that the virus' complexity and functionality "exceed those of all other cyber menaces known to date," Kapersky said.

Kapersky discovered the virus as Worm.Win32.Flame in an investigation which was initiated by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, after a number of destructive malware program - with the codename Wiper - which erased data on a number of computers in the Western Asia region. During the investigation, Kapersky Lab and the ITU discovered a new type of malware named Flame.

"The risk of cyber warfare has been one of the most serious topics in the field of information security for several years now. Stuxnet and Duqu belonged to a single chain of attacks, which raised cyberwar-related concerns worldwide," said Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab.

In June 2010, the computer virus Stuxnet was discovered which infected the system software Microsoft Windows. Some variants of Stuxnet targeted five entities in Iran and IT experts speculated that Israel and the U.S. were behind Stuxnet to disturb the disputed Iranian nuclear program.

Tehran finger-pointed at Tel Aviv and Washington but said that Stuxnet did not do serious harm, neither to its national IT- systems nor to its civil nuclear program.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet