News that Linux is often more secure than Microsoft Windows is hardly news to anyone, but recently I had this driven home in a painful manner. I've rebuilt many Windows XP and Vista machines in the past five or six years and almost all of them were from customers who had virus protection and in some cases spyware protections in place, but some how or other code got executed in the operating system that came from a website. I think I've been fair and compassionate in my pricing and some have even given me more money than I billed them and left contented because I saved their data. That's high praise and it always makes my day.  A week ago I got a message on Facebook from one of my friends whom I trusted, but at that particular moment I was sitting in front of my own Windows XP Professional desktop. The message invited me to go to a particular website and because it came from a friend I did, but not without some concern. As it turned out my concerns were validated as a command line window popped up on the screen and some code was excecuted without my permission. I wasn't pleased at all and just like that my computer was now home to a trojan designed to steal my passwords. Fortunately for me the AVG resident antivirus detected this attack and together with Spyware Doctor from Google I was able to remove the villain from my system.
 
I have found malicious code on Linux systems in the past and Clam antivirus usually does a good job of cleaning it up. However, malicious code usually doesn't get run without my permission because Linux itself is so secure that an attack like the recent trojan attack cannot occur.