[Term of the Day]: Fork Bomb
Term of the Day
"Fork Bomb"
What is Fork Bomb?
Fork bomb, also known as rabbit bomb or wabbit is a program that harms a system by making it run out of memory. A fork is a recursive bash function in Unix and Linux systems that is used to generate a new process by duplicating the calling process. The new process is referred to as the child process. The calling process is referred to as the parent process.
By doing this repeatedly, all available processes on the machine can be taken up. Hackers deploy this in denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) since the running copies of the program increase in number exponentially and quickly fill all available memory. Thus, it slows down the performance of the system or sometimes can cause system crashes due to resource starvation. Sometimes it can even be self-inflicted.
This attack is very effective in reducing a system's available resources and makes the system inaccessible and unusable.
One method of preventing fork bombs is limiting the number of processes each user can open. For example, if a user was limited to having 40 processes running, the fork bomb would hit the 40 process limit quickly. Therefore, it would be unable to cause the system to run out of resources.