Flame is a computer virus designed to spy on people, steal classified information and cause mass deletion of data. Code-named 'Flame' or 'Flamer', the malware is undetectable by standard anti-virus and anti-malware programmes and can be updated by its operators to expand its range of attack.

Unlike ordinary malware programs, Flame is much more complex and sophisticated in its design, suggesting that a government agency with significant budget and effort may be behind its development. As such, Flame is thought to be related to cyberwarfare and cyber espionage activities. The programme is up to 20 megabytes in size and includes many different libraries for compression and database manipulation, it even comes with an Lua virtual machine.

The Flame malware was first uncovered by Iran's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination centre (CertCC), which has conducted research into the malware for a number of months. Flame could have been released as long as five years ago and had infected machines in Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Hungary.