The company I work for recently had the beautiful experience of having Windows Defender delete our program from many of our customers computers during the weekend, with the consequent support calls the next day about "your program does not run and I'm losing money!" and the headache of having to find out why the exe is magically gone, since the antivirus going crazy is the last thing you think of.

"Thankfully" it seems they did a progressive rollout of whatever version of Defender that detects our software so we didn't get every customer angry at once, which would come pretty close to a business ending event.

So yeah malware seems an adequate word to me. Especially since there's no way to find out what heuristic we're tripping and no one to ask for help so there's no guarantee that this won't happen again in a few weeks.

The malicious mindset is right in the name. It redefines my computer to exist only in context of another thing. My hardware is now an """endpoint""" and not a standalone system.