Chris Hegan, general manager of Auckland Linux consultancy Asterisk, says the survey, by British self-described "digital risk specialist" Mi2g, amounts to scaremongering.

"It's specifically about website defacements, which are only one aspect of hacking."

The survey, released last month, says in the first six months of this year there were 7630 "overt digital attacks, excluding viruses and worms" on Linux web systems, compared with 5736 for all of 2001. IIS systems, on the other hand, have seen a decline, from 11,828 in the first half of 2001 to 9404 for the first half of this year.

Mi2g says "the Linux systems attacked deploy open source third-party applications, certain versions of which contain well-known vulnerabilities which are not being patched fast enough and continue to be exploited by hackers to gain control of the systems hosting the insecure application".

[ Read more ]