My dads MacBook Air became infected with a virus, so I wiped the HDD. Thing is, I'm trying to at least Zero Out the data, but when I try to in Disk Utility via my OS X thumb drive, "Security Options" is grayed out. Any ideas on how to bypass it?
You don't use secure erase options on SSDs... it's unnecessary and wears down the drive. Wiping was entirely unnecessary as well. I'm curious to know the name of this malware. It was clearly just affecting Safari since it can't affect the entire system like its Windows counterpart. Most of these malware are all bark and no bite. They say a lot, but do very little. Why didn't you scan with ClamXav or something? You could've also made a new account to see if it was account-specific or not... which they usually are.
They call that "ransomware", and yes I'm familiar with it. Just wondering what name it was, but that was a dumb question since you wouldn't know because you didn't scan for it (you probably wouldn't have found anything anyway since it's not technically malware, just a browser "hijacker"). You can find out more about it here: http://malwaretips.com/blogs/fbi-mac-os-x-virus/. As you can see from the article, it's a two second fix. It's hardly a big issue. The Windows counterpart is a pain to get rid of, but the Mac version is a minor annoyance. They're not even remotely the same thing. It's not even a virus, really (there aren't any viruses on the Mac). Alternatively you could've also used a free app cleaner tool to trash all the Safari settings. Something like this: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25276/appcleaner
I usually reformat an infected Windows PC since it's a lot easier/quicker than dealing with it. On a Mac, getting rid of malware is a relatively easy task. Fortunately though, Macs are a breeze to set up if you reformat... but I can understand where you're coming from. Clean formats are a good feeling.
The one I recommended, ClamXav, is free: http://www.clamxav.com