In this tongue‑in‑cheek post we dive deep—actually deeper than usual—into the world of malware string analysis by counting individual characters. After pulling roughly 500 malicious samples from theZoo and dasMalwerk and comparing them against a hefty collection of benign binaries, we discovered that a handful of seemingly innocuous characters (v, j, ;, , 4, q, 5, /) pop up more often in the bad guys’ code. By looking at raw counts and then normalising those counts by file size, we expose why naïve “character‑frequency” heuristics are both amusing and alarmingly unreliable. The piece is deliberately over‑the‑top, aiming to entertain seasoned security folks while reminding everyone that good malware hunting requires more nuance than a simple character checklist.