10/27/25:
It was fun building a Jeffries Tube for this episode! Creating a junction and spots for them to actually sit/lie was a challenge. (Plus the consoles.) Of course, squeezing Zack in there and then realizing I needed to move his head after he dropped the laptop
AGAIN was... well. Not to mention that our cat was REALLY wanting me to leave the basement and was doing so by hopping onto everything while meowing and purring, and then finally jumping onto my back.
But mostly fun
Zack's attack method on the virus here is a variaton on a technique I've used to neutralize some tough ones that liked to self-replicate if they couldn't see their main file. In my case, identify a virus's executable file and open it in Notepad. It would only show gibberish, because it was compiled code. But delete all the code inside there and then save the file
and now you have a virus that does absolutely nothing when the system runs it.
From there, I'd still have to search and scrub out the secondary parts of the infection that were designed to reinstall the virus. But without the main executable, the virus didn't realize that its core functions had been deleted, and was thus rendered more vulnerable.
I also think this strategy may have been how Jeff Goldblum shut down the alien computers in Independence Day. He couldn't actually understand their code, so instead, once he had a hardline connection, he just wrote a basic program that replaced the 1s and 0s with all 0s.
Comments from the Tagboard:
10/30/25 06:24 PM
Freezer: Malware can be insidious. I imagine tenfold so if you have to deal with it without your standard tools.
10/27/25 05:57 PM
Swiftbow: When everything is working properly, sure. Some viruses are more stubborn and are actively designed to shut down removal tools. I've been fixing computers/removing viruses for 21 years now. I'm pretty good at it.
10/27/25 01:52 PM
BrickVoid: I'm not sure that method you described for removing a virus from a computer in the comments section is how you're supposed to do it. You should identify the virus type, and then download a virus removal tool from an antivirus site. One should have antivirus installed anyway, Windows Defender is great but it can only do so much,
plus more recent versions for Windows 11 are getting bypassed by AI attack methods.
