due to web-based apps, it's not even necessary to install anything on a machine any more to be exploited thus, your actual OS becomes irrelevant. Aside from that, people of malicious intent are more than adept at tricking us into installing things for them and all it takes is one back-door. You could have all kinds and not even know it. For instance I run Linux Mint 11 on this machine. I'm experiencing inexplicable lag and processor slowness, I've checked all kinds of things, scanned with clam, I don't see anything happening that should be causing any performance decrease. Does this mean I picked up a nasty? no, and I'm pretty careful, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility either, and this behavior is one of the first signs that that I might have a nasty. plus, the type of people that create malware fall into the same demographic as the ones that would prefer to use Linux and there's two ways to look at that thought: they might consider Linux a safe-haven for themselves and want to preserve that haven (you don't **** where you eat), OR Linux being more familiar to them, and being very open to their manipulation, it might be even easier for them to remain undetected and defend themselves which is most likely the case, since they are more than capable of modifying source for their own use.