A Zip bomb or zip of death is a malicious file that appears innocent, which hides a huge amount of compressed data nested at different levels, so that in a very small zip of a few kilobytes, gigabytes of data can hide.
This is know as malicious file that appears innocent, which hides a huge amount of compressed data nested at different levels, so that in a very small zip of a few kilobytes, gigabytes of data can hide. Unzipping these types of files can crash your computer causing a buffer overflow, but none at the level of the “definitive” bomb that David Fifield has created, capable of “exploding” a zip of just 42 MB in 4.5 PB, that is, four and a half million gigabytes.
The ultimate Zip bomb created by David Fifield
Fifield’s ZipBomb with a size of 45 megabytes, reaches 4.5 petabytes is a non-recursive decompression, it exceeds the compression range 98 million times. In order to achieve this, It also needs to use Zip64, an extension of the zip format that raises the size of certain header fields to 64 bits, or it could not go beyond 281 TB of output, no matter how cleverly packed the zip package possible.
Although Fifield’s zip bomb is less compressed than 42.zip, meaning it requires a larger file (44 KB vs 45 MB), his bomb explodes into a file the size of almost all the data that Event Horizon captured to grab the first photo of a black hole, which is so much that it was easier to send by plane than by Internet.
See also:
Jokeroo – The ransomware that kidnaps
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