The compression algorithm that the Collective absorbed in Rick & Morty, I think is related to a real life type of malware called a logic bomb/zip bomb: a very small zip file that contains recursive, self-referential, or 99.9999% compressed dud files and directories.
Meaning it would run forever and fill up all your resources very quickly. Which is why sandboxing and heuristic analysis are invaluable in virus detection, because it's so easy to obfuscate.
A similar idea is used by Superman in the third film, he takes a liquid that is inert when contained, but when exposed to oxygen, heat and iron, turns into violent acid, which probably isn't true to real life but not far off reality.
