Suppose, you had a data that looked something like:

There’s one very popular zip bomb – a zip file that goes by the title ‘42.zip’: the file itself is just a few kilobytes, but when decompressed, it consumes 4.5 petabytes’ worth of space on the disk! ( Source)Ī zip bomb simply exploits the process of compression. exe file that wreaks havoc on your system as soon as you decompress it. In fact, in most cases, the decompression of such ‘zip bombs’ takes such a long time that the antivirus program crashes, and the ‘host’ system follows suit.Ī decompression bomb may be a zip file, a compressed installation file or even a certain program. In fact, there are hundreds upon hundreds of types of viruses, which differ in the way they are executed, the way they affect their ‘host’ system and the kind of damages that they cause.Īs mentioned earlier, a decompression bomb is a zip file that is so highly compressed that when it’s actually decompressed on a system, it takes up a huge amount of disk space.

in this article in more detail.Īs you might already know, not all computer viruses are the same. You can read more about computer viruses, malware, trojan horses etc. Once executed, a virus can harm your computer in many ways it can replicate files and folders, increase CPU load drastically, steal hard disk space, corrupt data, spam contacts, and do other such unpleasant things. Also known as the ‘zip of death’, a zip bomb is often used to render an antivirus program useless, so that more traditional viruses can gain entry into a system.Ī computer virus, commonly referred to as a ‘virus’, is a type of malware program that attaches itself to an executable program or a file and subsequently travels through other programs and files, infecting files in its wake. A decompression bomb or zip bomb is a malicious archive file that contains a lot of repeated data that can crash the program reading it.

How do zip files work