An operating system of choice for online fraudsters is Linux, Portland, Ore.-based fraud monitoring company iovation said in a detailed study released Monday.

“Interestingly, we found that 2.3% of all transactions from Linux-based machines, 1.4% of all transactions from Windows machines and 1% of all transactions from Macs were fraudulent,” Scott Waddell, vice president of technology at iovation, said in a prepared statement.

“You'll note that there were no mobile platforms in the top three; we believe this is because fraudsters prefer operating systems that make it easier to automate their schemes,” Waddell said.

iovation elaborated that it based its report on analysis of some one billion connected devices that the company tracks.

The company did not offer an opinion on why seemingly so much fraud originates on Linux devices – an operating system traditionally favored by the more technically astute – than on either Windows or Mac OS machines.

Central to the iovation analysis is that the company seeks to track not individual computer users as such but devices, each of which has unique identifying characteristics. In its report, iovation claimed that “in 84% of all transactions deemed fraudulent at iovation customers, iovation already had experience with the associated devices.”

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