Surfshark finds Windows PCs face 6x greater malware risk than Macs
Windows users face greater risks from Trojans and viruses, while macOS users have another threat to worry about. Credit: TippaPatt / Shutterstock.com VPN provider Surfshark has investigated the extent to which Windows and macOS are at risk from malware and phishing. The result: Windows users face a risk six times greater than macOS users.
- ▪Windows users face greater risks from Trojans and viruses, while macOS users have another threat to worry about.
- ▪Credit: TippaPatt / Shutterstock.com VPN provider Surfshark has investigated the extent to which Windows and macOS are at risk from malware and phishing.
- ▪The result: Windows users face a risk six times greater than macOS users.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | PCWorld |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcworld.com/article/3210550/windows-has-a-malware-risk-six-times-greater-than-macos-but-mac-users-face-a-different-threat.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:25:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T15:30:44.204Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T15:30:44.204Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | dj2Zhrvu5V2b · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Windows users face greater risks from Trojans and viruses, while macOS users have another threat to worry about. Credit: TippaPatt / Shutterstock.com VPN provider Surfshark has investigated the extent to which Windows and macOS are at risk from malware and phishing. The result: Windows users face a risk six times greater than macOS users. According to its own figures, the cybersecurity firm analyzed 391,305 malware detections logged by Surfshark Antivirus between January 1 and July 31. While Windows devices accounted for 66 percent of Surfshark’s active user base, they accounted for 92 percent of all threat detections. By comparison, only eight percent of threat detections were recorded on macOS, even though macOS users made up 34 percent of the user base.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCWorld.
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