According to the Honeynet Project, a non-profit security research firm, unpatched default Linux rollouts in the wild take an average of three months to compromise. This is a sharp break from much older reports, which put the number around 72 hours. It seems newer default Linux rollouts use better user privilege separation and have generally more secure settings out-of-the-box. Just another reason why Linux is free, yet hard to Pwn. In contrast, Windows XP unpatched is compromised in an average of four minutes.