Riskware covers legitimate programs (some of which are sold publicly and commonly used for legitimate purposes), which can cause damage when they fall into the hands of malicious users (and are used to delete, block, modify, or copy data, or disrupt the performance of computers or networks).
Programs in this class include remote administration utilities, IRC clients, dialer programs, file downloaders, software for monitoring computer activity, password management utilities, and numerous Internet server services such as FTP, web, proxy and telnet.
These programs are not malicious in themselves, although they do have functions that can be used for malicious purposes.
For example, a remote administration program such as WinVNC provides access to the interface of a remote computer and uses a remote machine to control or monitor it (...)