THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Whenever a high-ranking Iranian politician has sent or received an email in the past two years, a computer virus nicknamed Flame has most likely copied that email and secretly shipped it to an outside computer network.

When a user of an infected Iranian computer typed a password, Flame stole it. When the user opened a sensitive document or instant-messaged a friend or video-chatted with a colleague, Flame nabbed that, too.

Flame, which reportedly has infected hundreds of computers across Iran and the Middle East, is probably the most sophisticated computer virus ever detected, say the experts who discovered it this week.

Flame's sheer size and the information it seeks it's taking data, not money probably makes it the handiwork of a government or group of governments, say the experts at Kaspersky, the respected Russian lab that identified the virus.

And Flame may well be the latest weapon in a series of cyberskirmishes that have exploded in size and sophistication in recent years, say local and national computer security experts interviewed by The World-Herald.

In this largely hidden fight, the Chinese and Russian governments are believed to have used computer worms and viruses to steal American government secrets, as well as staggering amounts of proprietary information from U.S. companies.

And the United States and Israel are suspected of collaborating on an earlier computer worm known as Stuxnet, which famously crippled the Iranian nuclear program in 2010.

Flame, by contrast, appears to be spying, not seeking to destroy Iranian computer systems.

It actually looks a lot like traditional espionage, but how it gets done has changed, said Robin Gandhi, a University of Nebraska at Omaha computer security expert and professor affiliated with the Peter Kiewit Institute. This isn't your typical virus. ... The whole point of (Flame) is to be sneaky and stealthy and gather data as you go about your business, never noticing.

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Super-stealthy ‘Flame' computer virus spies on Iranians