This “Zip Bomb” Is Like A Nuclear Bomb For Your Computer.

Whenever you want to send someone a chunk of files you are left with the option of compressing it into a small zip file and send it. It makes things easier for both the sender and receiver.  But imagine the next time you receive a zip file and after you open it or decompress it, it gets exploded into a humongous Petabytes of data. Yes that’s a nightmare comes true as a researcher named David Fifield has developed the Zip Bomb that is just like a Nuclear bomb for your computer.  He has successfully compressed a 4.5Petabytes of data into a 46MB file which means around 30 billion Facebook photos are compressed and stored into a 46MB file. WTF!

Fifield says in his blog “It works by overlapping files inside the zip container, in order to reference a ‘kernel’ of highly compressed data in multiple files, without making multiple copies of it. The zip bomb’s output size grows quadratically in the input size; i.e., the compression ratio gets better as the bomb gets bigger,”  One more bad thing is it can even evade some of the most popular anti-virus programs.  So it’s better not to fall prey to such malicious file because once opened it can stall your system and make it unusable. Till next time stay safe, stay connected and stay updated.