its hobbies most likely consist of "feeding on geothermal heat" and "being adapted to an extremely stable, homogeneous environment
As a stable, homogenous environment, and a source of heat, I find this worrying.
(Yes, I know that, jokes aside, it wouldn't last an hour against a modern immune system.)
On a modern network, it is.... at least at the consumer level where nobody knows how to configure a subnet manually, but if you're managing any kind of large scale network it becomes very difficult to work with static configurations on every workstation even when you know how.
My point is that it is *incredibly* trivial to connect to a wireless router that has DHCP enabled and just use an IP address of your choosing. It's a perfectly normal thing to do if you want to be able to predictably SSH a machine or something, and even MS Windows has a GUI way of doing it. Somebody who is sniffing network traffic and cracking encryption keys can easily determine which addresses are already in use, and in practice, if you take an address at the high end of the range (e.g. 192.168.1.250), you won't run in to any trouble with other clients.
It allows for a certain amount of changes over time, e.g. changing disk. It contacts the activation servers during activation, but after that it *never* phones home.
A single motherboard swap can trip it.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
