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Much has been made of the security credentials of the Unix-based Mac OS X in the past, with some security companies even advising consumers that a Mac might be the easy path for those that don't want the hassle of complicated security software.

Although there have been high profile instances of exploits being written for the platform over the past year, such as Leap and Inqtana, these have been exclusively proof of concept affairs.

The latest evidence shows that the Mac is unlikely to be somewhere you can bury your head in the sand over security issues.

With Apple growing in popularity and having moved to the familiar architecture of Intel chips, it is proving a magnet for virus writers.

The real evidence can be seen in the numbers of vulnerabilities. Apple's browser software, Safari, clocked up 12 flaws in the first six months of 2006, according to Symantec.

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Not many, but this is double the six reported in the second half of 2005 and triple the four that were disclosed in the first half of 2005.

It's not evidence that Safari is becoming increasingly poorly coded but rather that researchers and virus writers are studying the browser more closely to find holes.

'OS X is actually of great interest to security researchers today, more so than other Unix-type operating systems,' said Kaspersky in its latest biannual report.

Symantec agrees: 'The sharp increase in the number of Apple Safari vulnerabilities over the past 12 months offers evidence that security researchers are increasingly turning their attention to Mac OS X.'

Apple is responding. For the first half of this year it took an average of 37 days to patch flaws in its platform - a significant reduction from the 73-day average in the second half of 2005.

However, in its Safari browser, things are going in the opposite direction. Whereas patches for security issues were available before virus writers could get started on writing exploits for the second half of 2005, the first half of 2006 showed a gap of five days between exploit code being written and a patch being available.

The security risk in Apple software remains at best embryonic. There is, however, real evidence now that hackers are looking for flaws and finding them.