Linux is a powerful force in today’s computing landscape. The recent Linux Threat Report 2021 from TrendMicro, for example, notes that 100 percent of the world's top 500 supercomputers run on Linux, 50 percent of the top 1,000 websites in the world use it, and it runs on 96 percent of the top 1 million web servers worldwide.
However, Linux is also vulnerable to attack, and the TrendMicro report takes an in-depth look at the Linux threat landscape for the first half of 2021, detailing the most common types of malware and other vulnerabilities.
According to the report, the top threat types affecting Linux servers from January 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021 are:
- Coinminers: 24.5%
- Web shells: 19.9%
- Ransomware: 11.5%
- Trojans: 9.6%
- Other: 3.1%
Because Linux has a large footprint, the report states, “there's bound to be a percentage of its administrators who unwittingly expose Linux systems and, ultimately, critical data.” For example:
- Data from Censys.io showed the number of exposed Linux devices to be almost 14 million on July 6, 2021.
- Other results found that nearly 19 million devices connected to the internet on July 27, 2021 had port 22 (commonly used for SSH) exposed.
Read more at TrendMicro.
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