Malware software has long since moved beyond traditional black and white, malicious or innocent, to varying shades of gray.  And determining if a program is either unwanted or unsafe can be difficult to classify. To decide if a program is a Potentially Unwanted Applications (PUA), researchers must look at what the program does, and its intent behind it.

In this paper, discover what is a PUA and explore the differences between threats posed by malicious types of software such as computer viruses and worms, and those which are classified as being potentially unwanted.