Riskware, a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsrisk In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value (such as health, well-being, wealth, property or the environm ...

and

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

, is a word used to describe software whose

installation Installation may refer to: * Installation (computer programs) * Installation, work of installation art * Installation, military base * Installation, into an office, especially a religious (Installation (Christianity) Installation is a Christian li ...

and

execution Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that ...

poses a potential risk to a

host computer A network host is a computer or other device connected to a computer network. A host may work as a server offering information resources, services, and applications to users or other hosts on the network. Hosts are assigned at least one network ...

. Relatively normal programs can often fall into the category of riskware as some

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

can be modified for another purpose and used against the computer user or owner.

Examples

While a wide variety of software may be considered riskware, one common example is

Remote desktop software In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software- or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely off of one system (usually a PC, but the concept applies equally to a server or a ...

. This type of software has both legitimate purposes, such as when used for remote technical support, but could also be used by an unauthorized user for malicious purposes. Damir Mujezinovic: What Is Riskware? Here's Everything You Need to Know. MakeUseOf, October 30, 2022, https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-riskware/

References

External links

Riskware-Kaspersky IT Encyclopedia
Types of malware {{malware-stub

Examples

See also

References

External links