There is a new Linux trojan designed to steal banking and credit card information.

http://www.zdnet.com/linux-desktop-troj ... 000019175/

While it might be a threat to Linux users wouldn't the numbers of linux users be relatively low? I thought that most Linux machines are servers.

A lot of government machines in other countries & defence personnel machines are Linux (so they're not reliant on a single vendor).
Developing countries also can be heavily reliant on Linux due OEM MS costs.

A lot of people also use Linux, either in a separate partition/virtual machine or a Live CD specifically for things like Banking, because until now it has been secure against such attacks.

A Live CD would still probably be relatively secure, because you would need to have email or a social network running (either in web browser or dedicated application) in order to receive the trojan. When the machine is shut down, the trojan would be removed from memory and when the system is restarted, the trojan would not be around, so the user would need to infect themselves again.

With a secondary partition/virtual machine, if the user falls for it once, it will be there for every future session until manually removed.

That said, if they are using the VM specifically for financial transactions, then they shouldn't be browsing emails or reading social networks on their "secure" platform.

I doubt that these people will have a significant online banking presence. This is more targeted at Linux users in the West. I fully appreciate the benefits of linux especially for governments and companies, as you mentioned the OS licenses can be horrendous.