system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do anti-virus scanners "quarantine" viruses to prevent them from working?
gpt
Details depend on the individual anti-virus software. Quarantine sounds very fancy/advanced but most AV use very simple techniques to "quarantine" viruses.

I'd say following steps will be sufficient to "quarantine" malware

* Tell operating system to stop the malicious process
* Move the infected file, e.g. an `.exe` to a "safe" location

The safe location is just a directory where users don't normally go. AV might take additional steps to make the file unrunnable. A simple way would be to rename the file from `.exe` to `.exe.virus`. Windows uses filename extensions like `.exe` to determine what to do with a file. Changing that file extensions means, that Windows does not recognize the file as program anymore and will not attempt to run the virus.

The important part here is, that all these measures are easily reversable. In case the AV has falsely flagged a legit file, the "quarantined" file can be quickly restored.