Linux is not a more secure environment than NT or Windows, Internet Security Systems chief technology officer Chris Klaus warns.

"Linux has just as many security holes as Windows in terms of how often we see vulnerabilities appearing," Mr Klaus said.

"Recently there have been two major Trojan horses found in open source projects - one in Sunmail, which is the email package for most Unix systems including Linux, and the other was OpenSSH."

Technical people liked open source because they could go to the internet, grab a patch and fix problems quickly, he said. But they failed to appreciate the huge cost of doing that across hundreds or thousands of machines in a company.

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