Many types of computer viruses completely remove valuable information, making a "sweep" of the user's hard drive. But recently, a different type of malware appeared on the network - a malicious program leads to a complete incapacity of a PC by a much more unusual method.
“ZIP bombs,” or “file bombs,” have been known to cybersecurity experts for more than a year: this type of virus, packed into an archive, when activated, fills the entire hard disk space and overloads PC resources. According to the publication Vice, programmer David Fifield developed the most "deadly" modification of malicious software. When downloading a zip-archive takes only 46 megabytes, but when trying to unpack it can grow to 4.5 petabytes.
Total Fifield published a description of three known types of malware:
- The file size of 42 KB, which after unpacking is 5.5 GB
- The original archive is 10 MB unpacking to 281 TB
- The above "bomb" of 46 MB, occupying 4.5 PB after activation
The first version of the virus can cause a significant decrease in the performance of old computers, the second can "hang" even the top gaming PC. The potential of the most powerful "bomb" exceeds the capabilities of large servers. With his publication, the programmer urged software developers to pay attention to the danger of processing archive file formats. Currently, according to Fifield, methods of detection of such algorithms by antivirus software difficult.
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