Reports of a new computer virus, dubbed "Flame," have raised alarms about a new era of cyber threats. While countries are increasingly reliant on cyberspace for their very survival — it is now part of the social, economic and security infrastructure — it remains a largely unregulated domain; worse, behavioral norms in cyberspace remain underdeveloped.
Fortunately, Flame is not the catastrophic piece of malware that the media has portrayed. That does not mean, however, that we can continue to be so laissez faire about devising rules and norms to govern cyberspace, particularly its strategic dimensions.
Flame was recently discovered by Kaspersky Labs, an Internet security company that was asked by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to analyze malware (software written to do "bad" things to computers) it found on computers in Iran and the Middle East. The malware was designed to commit espionage: It stole files, captured keystrokes, turned microphones on and off remotely (allowing conversations to be heard and recorded), and intercepted network traffic, among other things.