Linux, Mac viruses on the rise
The crusade to win a greater share of the operating system market away from Microsoft's Windows has long fired up the hearts of the Mac and Linux faithful. But popularity breeds contempt - from hackers. A new study of "malware" - viruses, worms, and other software nasties - released Friday by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab shows a doubling in the number of viruses and worms targeting Linux from 2004 to 2005. The trend is worth watching, says Linux Pipeline, but must be put in context. There were only 863 cases of Linux attacks last year, while Symantec found 11,000 viruses and worms in Windows. And Apple's (Research) Mac? It got off easy in the Kaspersky report, but last week brought news of vulnerabilities in OS X, following on a February report of the first documented Mac OS X virus. Additionally, independent security researcher Tom Ferris posted to his blog a series of "serious" Mac security breaches that he recently discovered.
