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Dwayne Phillips

Dwayne Phillips

Engineer, computing, consulting, writing, teaching, and a few other things in an effort to make us all better and smarter.

It’s Called Malware

1 min readOct 22, 2026

by Dwayne Phillips

Rogue AI agents? Nope, it’s called malware.

Malware (a portmanteau of malicious software) is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption or destruction to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive access to information, or interfere with the user’s computer security and privacy without their knowledge. — Wikipedia

These AI agents sometimes turn rogue and breach systems on the Internet and leak personal data that shouldn’t be leaked and destroy records and there is no end to the mischief of these rogues.

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Bologna.

This is malware. This is software that destroys systems and costs people resources. Turn on an agent and later discover what it did. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to do that. Sorry.

Well, maybe a “bug” is a better description of this software. I mean the folks at those AI companies didn’t intend to do harm and wreak havoc. It was an honest mistake. Sort of like software that deletes all the files because the programmer made a mistake.

Oh, so the programmers didn’t test their software. Well, we are back to the beginning. Stop letting grad students play with software on the Internet to see what it might do. Act like adults. Yes, you are smarter than the average folks who setup the average systems and connected them to the Internet. Take it easy on those average folks. They do things for you that you don’t want to do for yourselves.

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Dwayne Phillips
Dwayne Phillips

Written by Dwayne Phillips

Engineer, computing, consulting, writing, teaching, and a few other things in an effort to make us all better and smarter.