BOSTON, May 28 (Reuters) – Security experts discovered a highly complex computer virus in Iran and the Middle East that they believe was deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored espionage.

Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that claimed responsibility for discovering the virus.

Kaspersky researchers said they have yet to determine whether Flame had a specific mission like Stuxnet, and declined to say who they think built it.

Iran has accused the United States and Isreal of deploying Stuxnet.

Cyber security experts said the discovery provides new evidence to the public to show what experts privy to classified information have long known: that nations have been using pieces of malicious computer code as weapons to promote their security interests for several years.

“This is one of many, many campaigns that happen all the time and never make it into the public domain,” said Alexander Klimburg, a cyber security expert at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs.

A cyber security agency in Iran said on its website on Monday that Flame bore a “close relation” to Stuxnet, the notorious computer worm that attacked that country’s nuclear program in 2010 and is the first publicly known example of a cyber weapon.

BOSTON, May 28 (Reuters) – Security experts have discovered a new data-stealing virus dubbed Flame they say has lurked inside thousands of computers across the Middle East for as long as five years as part of a sophisticated cyber warfare campaign.

It is the most complex piece of malicious software discovered to date, said Kaspersky Lab security senior researcher Roel Schouwenberg, whose company discovered the virus. The results of the Lab’s work were made available on Monday.

Schouwenberg said he did not know who built Flame.

If the Lab’s analysis is correct, Flame could be the third major cyber weapon uncovered after the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, and its data-stealing cousin Duqu, named after the Star Wars villain.

The discovery by one of the world’s largest makers of anti-virus software will likely fuel speculation that nations have already secretly deployed other cyber weapons.

“If Flame went on undiscovered for five years, the only logical conclusion is that there are other operations ongoing that we don’t know about,” Schouwenberg said in an interview.

The Moscow-based company is controlled by Russian malware researcher Eugene Kaspersky, and gained notoriety in cyber weapons research after solving several mysteries surrounding Stuxnet and Duqu.

BOSTON (Reuters) – Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg spoke to Harvard University students in her first public appearance since the company’s disappointing initial public offering, but refrained from addressing the controversy around its messy, glitch-plagued debut.

Instead, Sandberg urged students graduating this week from Harvard’s business school to work for fast-growing companies, communicate honestly and address inequality in the workplace.

“We need to acknowledge openly that gender remains at issue at the highest levels,” she told a crowd of students and their families assembled Wednesday afternoon on a lawn outside the business school library alongside Boston’s Charles River. Only about 16 percent of the highest corporate jobs are held by women, the same level as a decade ago, she noted.

Sandberg, who visited her alma mater with her parents and two children, only once made reference to the IPO in her speech. After urging the graduates to use Facebook to stay in touch, she said: “We’re public now, so could you please click on an ad or two while you’re there.”

Asked before and after the speech to comment on the IPO, Sandberg said she not speaking to the media.

She told the crowd that she sometimes suffers from anxiety: “When things are unresolved, I get a tad anxious,” said the 42-year-old who became one of Harvard’s wealthiest alumni after the IPO. “People have never accused me of being too calm.”

She chatted and posed for photos with dozens of students after the speech. Several said they had accepted jobs with Facebook. “I’ll see you over the summer,” she said to one of them.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Top European software company SAP AG plans to buy Ariba Inc in a deal valuing the business and commerce network company at $4.3 billion, its latest maneuver against Oracle in the fast-growing Internet-based computing market.

SAP is taking aim at Oracle, the world’s No. 2 maker of business management software, as they vie with Salesforce.com Inc in the multibillion dollar cloud-computing services market, one of the industry’s hottest area of growth.

Shares in Ariba, which were halted briefly, leapt 20 percent to SAP’s offer price of about $45 per share.

“This deal puts them more on the radar screen and gives them another big customer base they can sell additional services into. These are not inexpensive moves but it signals they are really tilting more toward the cloud,” said Evercore analyst Kirk Materne.

SAP’s announcement comes just weeks before Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is due to announce the Silicon Valley company’s latest cloud software strategy, on June 6.

The $45-per-share offer for Ariba, a darling of the first dotcom boom that has since reinvented itself as a major networking and online commerce software developer, values Ariba at 6.9 times expected 2013 revenue, according to Roth Capital Partners.

Salesforce.com trades around 5.5 times expected revenue.