[Term of the Day]: Zip Bomb

Term of the Day

“Zip Bomb”

Definition — What is a Zip Bomb?

The classic Zip Bomb is a tiny zip archive file, also know as 'Zip of Death' or 'Decompression Bomb'. It is usually a small compressed file that can contain malicious data. On extracting or unpacking the file, it could explode from a few KB to a few GB, TB, or even PB, which can cause the computer to crash because it is incapable of processing that much data. Zip Bombs are mainly designed by attackers to crash antivirus software so that the system can be easily infected by other types of malware.

Zip Bomb is truly a work of clever technical intelligence. There’s one very popular zip bomb called 42.zip and has a size of 42KB. It contains recursively nested zip-files. On the lowest level, there is a single file that decompresses to a size of 4.3GB. This file is added in total over a million times to the archive, leading to a total unpacked size of 4.5PB. This is well over the size of any available storage system.

The Conclusion - Zip Bomb's are harmful to the system because they make the ‘environment’ of a computer more conducive for an attack by traditional viruses. Thankfully, modern antivirus programs can detect whether a file is a zip bomb, and alert the user so they don’t try to unpack it.