You could be the victim of a zip bomb, also called a decompression bomb or encoding bomb.
What Are Zip Bombs?
It is common for these bombs to containmalware and viruses.
A zip bomb on your gadget is not harmful until you open it.
Emails are one of the most common ways people receive zip bombs.
These bombs can also accompany downloads from unsecured sites.
You should not confuse a zip bomb with a regular ZIP file.
Although they are zip bombs, not all zip bombs are ZIP files.
How Do Zip Bombs Work?
Thats several million gigabytes of meaningless, nonsensical text or media crammed into one compressed file!
However, they all have the singular motive of causing your system and antivirus tool to crash.
This file explodes to about 4.5 petabytes once opened or uncompressed.
Even the best PCs will be intensely overwhelmed.
They are both small-sized, appear to occupy no space, and need decompression to be viewed.
However, with modernantivirus software applications, overlapping files of recursive data can be identified for deletion.
All you would need to do is to cycle your system, and the bomb would be all gone.
They do this by scanning for overlapping recursive files.
Only Interact with Reputable Sites
Countless sites on the internet are not secure.
Avoid downloading files from sites where you’re free to not ascertain their verity or security.
You might sometimes find that youve received an email from a strange address bearing an attachment.
It could be spam or, worse, a zip bomb in disguise.
If you open it, you risk crashing your system or triggering adenial of service attack.
Instead, flag the email as spam and delete it immediately.
Take extra caution when it is a ZIP file.
Apply this knowledge, and you will identify and sidestep zip bombs, no matter their format.
