The Linux fans will be thrilled to find out that their favorite operating system have proved the safest at the contest organized this week by the security firm TippingPoint.

The contest was in Vancouver, Canada and it had three phases: during the first day, only network attacks were allowed, but none of the laptops could be broken into remotely. In the second day, rules stated that the hacker could give instructions to a staff member. During the third day, the rules of the contest allow the installation of popular 3rd party client applications on the notebooks.

The prizes were $20,000 for those who would manage to break the security of the laptops in the first day, $10,000 on day two and only $5,000 on the third day.

Apple’s MacBook was first to be hacked and for the team led by Charlie Miller, an analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, two minutes were enough to break the notebook.

The team of Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff, and Mark Daniel from Independent Security Evaluators has successfully compromised the Apple MacBook Air by exploiting a brand new 0day vulnerability in Apple's Safari web browser.

In the third and final day Shane Macaulay from Security Objectives won the Fujitsu U810 laptop running Vista Ultimate SP1 after it was installed with the latest version of Adobe Flash.

In addition he won also $5,000, which he will probably share with the friends who helped him, Derek Callaway and Alexander Sotirov.

At the end of the third day, a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37CN laptop running Ubuntu remained unhacked.