"This was discovered during the investigation of a wiping of Iran's gas companies' computers," Liam O Murchu, manager of operations at Symantec's security response center, said in an interview Tuesday.

O Murchu was referring to reports out of Iran a month ago, when the that servers at several companies had been attacked. Later, other officials there acknowledged that the attacks had been and industries.

At the time, Iran admitted that the attacks had crippled some machines by wiping their hard drives, but claimed that it had been able to restore the servers using backups.

Reports from Iran's state-backed media said that officials had identified the hackers responsible for the attacks.

It's unclear whether Flame -- the name assigned to a massive and advanced piece of malware seemingly designed for cyber espionage, reconnaissance and data theft -- was the cause of the data wiping in Iran, said O Murchu.