Ok, so for those who may not have known the background behind the last post (Hi Mum), the CanSecWest Competition was a contest set up where people could hack into one of three laptops to win that laptop and $10,000. The three laptops (one running Apple's OSX Leopard, one running Windows Vista SP1 and the third running Ubuntu Linux) were all left standing at the end of day 1 of the contest, during which time the hacks were required to not have the User do anything and the laptops were running a default installation of the latest version (all patches applied) of their OS. On day 2, the hacks were allowed to be kicked off by visiting a website, reading an email or some other normal user action. Within 2 minutes of day 2, the Apple laptop had been hacked into after being sent to a malicious webpage, which led to Roughly Drafted's outcry of "Macs have no vulnerabilities", "of course it was hacked first - it was a more desirable machine to win", "the contest is flawed because it uses only undiscovered holes" and "the event is sponsored by Microsoft". None of those outcries explains why the other 2 laptops survived the rest of the day.
However, when day 3 rolled around and extra 3rd party software was loaded onto the two remaining machines, the Vista laptop was finally hacked into via a vulnerability in Flash. And at the end of day 3 (the final day of the competition) the only laptop which remained safe and secure was running Ubuntu.
This is a major moment for Linux since the result definitely suggests that Linux is the most secure of the three operating systems. Kudos. However, we can still assume that all three operating systems have security issues, and all the contest really showed is that Ubuntu's were the hardest to find/hack in three days. Noone's allowed to get too cocky in this world.

It is an uncontroversial fact that Windows PCs suffer under the threat of tens of thousands of real world viruses, are routinely infected by malware and often unwittingly participate in spam and adware botnets, while Mac systems have no viruses, and no significant real world malware, spyware or botnet problems. However, there is a constant din of pundits, researchers, and security product salesmen who insist that Macs not only have serious security problems, but may actually suffer from more vulnerabilities than Windows PCs. How can these two contradictory ideas possibly be harmonized?