An Irish Government entity, along with high profile government targets in Belgium, Portugal and the Czech Republic, has been targeted by an espionage virus, according to a malware expert.

The virus, known as MiniDuke, is a malicious new programme designed for spying on multiple government entities and institutions across the world, according to Kaspersky Lab, a global provider of protection solutions.

“We know that it has been created for extracting information and tracking infected machines, and for getting information from the targets using them, but we have no information about what exact information has been got,” said Igor Soumenkov, malware expert at Kaspersky Lab.