If it’s true that the USA and Israel are the brains behind the infamous Flame malware that’s been causing havoc in Iran and other Middle Eastern nations, then our ‘cyber spies’ have been much busier than we first thought.

According to the security provider Kaspersky, the Flame malware has been linked to no less than three new malicious programs that it’s just uncovered, following an extensive investigation into the former.

Kaspersky says that it stumbled across the new viruses whilst it was analyzing a series of command and control servers it believes were used by the creators of Flame. The company says that it has reason to suspect that at least one of the new malwares is already “out in the wild” causing damage and stealing information.

According to the research by Kaspersky:

“Sophisticated encryption methods were utilized so that no one but the attackers could obtain the data uploaded from infected machines. analysis of the scripts used to handle data transmissions to the victims revealed four communication protocols, and only one of them was compatible with Flame.”

“It means that at least three other types of malware used these Command and Control servers. There is enough evidence to prove that at least one Flame-related malware is operating in the wild.”

The researchers added that the discovery of the new malware programs indicated that Flame was first developed as far back as 2006, almost four years earlier than they had previously believed.

It wasn’t until last May that the Flame virus was finally unearthed, drawing widespread concerns within the cyber security industry due about its highly advanced espionage capabilities.

Despite an ongoing research campaign into Flame by Kaspersky, Symantec, IMPACT and CERT-Bund/BSI, investigators remain in the dark about the full scale of the malware and the damage its wrought.

Alexander Gostev, chief of security at Kaspersky, said that Flame is likely to have affected thousands of devices, although they could only guess at the true number:

“It was problematic for us to estimate the amount of data stolen by Flame, even after the analysis of its Command and Control servers. Flame’s creators are good at covering their tracks. But one mistake of the attackers helped us to discover more data that one server was intended to keep.”

“Based on this we can see that more than five gigabytes of data was uploaded to this particular server a week, from more than 5,000 infected machines. This is certainly an example of cyber espionage conducted on a massive scale.”

Experts believe that Flame was developed either by the US or Israel, or possibly both nations, in response to the perceived threat of a nuclear-capable Iran, although neither country has admitted to any involvement.