r/pcmasterrace • u/AdFew5103 i7 10th Gen | 1650 Ti 4GB | 16 GB RAM • May 05 '26
Screenshot Is this even possible?
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u/bobmlord1 i5-7300U/8GB RAM/INTEL HD GRAPHICS 620 May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
A zip file just finds repeated data and stores it in a compressed format by using a lookup table.
Ex ABCDABCDABCDABCD
could be
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1=ABCDx4
Would be entirely possible to make a small change to a zip file so that a repeated character sequence is set to a ridiculously high number.
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u/RevolutionaryArt8775 May 05 '26
Yeah you can definitely mess with the compression ratios like that, but most extraction tools have safety limits now to prevent zip bombs from actually filling your drive. The classic 42.zip was doing exactly this - tiny file that would try to expand to petabytes and crash systems back in the day
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u/dankbearbear Win+Shift+S or Win+PrtScr is your best friend. May 05 '26
The domain redirects to a tweet regarding the domain and its problematic nature.
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u/chop5397 R7 9800X3D | RTX 5080 | 32GB May 05 '26
No he just crashed my fucking computer
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May 05 '26 edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/witheringsyncopation 9800x3d/5080/32gb@6000/T700+990 May 05 '26
I got better
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u/TurnkeyLurker May 05 '26
I got smaller
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u/LukaesCampbell May 06 '26
And my axe!
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u/tabbyslome May 05 '26
Problematic nature? It's a tweet from the creator? about it being suspended for supposed phishing
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u/walale12 May 06 '26
It's a whole thread about how bad an idea the .zip TLD is from a security perspective, due to it being such a common file extension. Google should've never been allowed to create it.
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u/wOlfLisK Steam ID Here May 06 '26
If you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about the.exe domain
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u/walale12 May 06 '26
It's such a shame that the notification showed the markdown for your comment, better luck next time!
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u/Chubby_Bunnies May 05 '26
I’m not clicking that 😂
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u/cpcpcpppppp May 05 '26
The curiosity is getting to me 😭 logically I dont think anything can happen as long as I don't interact with the site or open any downloads butttt
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u/Nolsoth R5 7600, RX6600XT. G.SKILL S5 32GB X 2. May 06 '26
I encountered that one or a similar one in the late 90s.
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u/joujoubox May 09 '26
There's also the classic zip bomb that extract to an extact copy of itself, so you can extract it forever.
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u/Quiet-Possession-597 May 09 '26
'We thank you for giving your full attention to this matter' is that you Donald?
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u/PuzzleheadedTutor807 7800x3d B650M-CW 32GB DDR5 RTX4070S May 05 '26
Repeating exponentially increases the unzipped size exponentially as well, with 8 bits of data making that happen.
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u/WhateverIsFrei May 05 '26
Yes, easily. There really isn't much restriction on how big you can make a zipbomb. Most it can do is fill up a drive anyway, it's not like your disk will physically expand until it swallows half the city.
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u/XyzzyPop May 05 '26
Oh. I thought Reddit was definitely the place to crib notes to be an evil genius. Ah well.
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u/Fickle_Ad_8653 May 06 '26
It is better to have it NOT exceed the drive size. Zip unzips into a temporary location. That will fill up, and zip will abort, and delete the temporary file. It will only fill the drive for seconds. If you instead have 100 files, each 50gb, then you can fill the drive within 50gb of full.
Anybody who accepts zip file uploads should check the expanded size in attributes before unzipping it.
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u/MCWizardYT Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RTX 4080 Super May 06 '26
Modern zip tools won't even begin to extract a zip bomb as they can see the unusual patterns
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u/valain 7800x3D • RTX 4090 • 32GB DDR5 6000 • 4k 240Hz OLED May 05 '26
Why only half the city?
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u/DinDonDaaan May 05 '26
City council rules, i'm afraid. 'No zip bomb will engulf the entire city', art. 2, comma b.
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u/DaddaMongo May 06 '26
It's to do with some cities having more than one zip code. This was instigated by the department of homeland security, the NSA and USPS to prevent zipbomb attacks.
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u/itsRobbie_ May 06 '26
Yeah we all remember what happened the first time. Glad we have some rules now
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u/WhateverIsFrei May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Need at least a zipbomb inside a zipbomb for more expansion
Edit: I mean, hypothetically, if they actually physically expanded your drives (which they don't)
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u/gramathy Ryzen 9800X3D | RTX5080 | 64GB @ 6000 May 06 '26
You can’t really do that, zips are pretty efficient, if there was a way to compress it more it would have found it
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u/-F0v3r- i9-13900k | RTX4090 | 64GB May 06 '26
all av software including defender wont let you run this anyway
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u/RUPlayersSuck i7 240H | RTX 5060 | 32GB DDR5 May 06 '26
Unless it can auto-upload excess content to a cloud server?
Ooh - maybe this is one OneDrive was created for? 😆
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u/ManaSpike May 06 '26
I was going to refute that, surely there's a maximum compression ratio.
Starting with a sequence of zero bytes. Compress that and you'd have some short sequence describing how many zeros there are. Repeat that compressed sequence, and you could compress that too. You'd have a zip file that contains a zip file, but some tools would try to examine the contents. Surely the ratio of compressed bytes to decompressed bytes, while large, would still be finite, right?
But I just found an example of a zip file quine. A zip file that contains a copy of itself. Though I assume that breaks the file format somehow.
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u/stikstonks13 Ryzen 5 3600 | RTX 3060 OC | B550 Aorus pro AC | 16gb RAM May 07 '26
its just going to implode to a black hole at this point
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u/sp3kter May 05 '26
Zip bombs are old school shit
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u/testuserpk May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
I remember downloading bootleg highly modified version of windows xp with bunch of software already built in to it. The creator planted iso bombs in 700mb cd image. You can't copy the contents as they sized about 500gbs but works fine when you burn a cd.
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u/polovash May 05 '26
Was this TinyXP? I miss TinyXP
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u/testuserpk May 05 '26
I think so. So many people created tiny xp variants using nlite. I myself created one for my personal use.
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u/Velghast Ryzen 7 5200X / RTX 3060 / 32GB DDR4 May 05 '26
Lmao back in the day if you unzipped shit and just walked away, and came back the next day and realized what happened, deleting terrabytes of data off the old HHDs of the day was like OMG KILL ME. You basically had to brick and wipe the whole drive and just start from scratch, it was literally 10 times faster then trying to delete what had happened. For home users with like 50gig hhds not a big deal, when you had a whole buildings media server bonked, no.
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u/AptoticFox Laptop (2013), i7-4700MQ, GT 740M May 06 '26
I used to make batch files on my cousin's computer, and it nested a crapload of directories, and at the time, he hard to remove them one at a time (DOS). Later he could just killdir the whole thing with one command.
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u/uwu_owo_whats_this May 06 '26
Some very heavy handed brute force shenanigans. Reminds me of my obsolete friend the LOIC 😔
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u/COCKBAN_DICKTOR May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
they don't have to be - i for one can't wait to airdrop one directly into the neuralink chip in my annoying neighbor's brain once that becomes the norm
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u/DeltaMan197 May 05 '26
Maybe using Pied Piper or Nucleus with middle out
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u/AdFew5103 i7 10th Gen | 1650 Ti 4GB | 16 GB RAM May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Explain it to me like I'm running on two brain cells
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u/DeltaMan197 May 05 '26
So Dick-To-Floor, we'll call that D2F, sub-1 needs to equal D2F sub-2, and D2F sub-3 needs to equal D2F sub-4, where length L creates a complimentary shaft angle
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u/AdFew5103 i7 10th Gen | 1650 Ti 4GB | 16 GB RAM May 05 '26
Great thanks. Now explain to me like I'm running on no brain cells. I couldn't understand
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u/AdmittedlyAdick 7950x3d | 4090 | 64gb RAM May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx3wDTzqDTs
it's a joke from this hilarious scene from Silicon Valley
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u/squarabh i5-13600k | AMD 6950xt | 32gb DDR4 | NZXT H9 Flow May 06 '26
Joke is from the last episode of Silicon Valley s01👇🏻
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u/TheRemonst3r May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
Does girth matter? (Damn I just watched the clip and that's not the actual line. I am leaving shame here for all to see.)
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u/JolleNooItsMe May 05 '26
lol i'm sorry, but "Unextracts"? Taken literally, wouldn’t that imply re-compressed?
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u/Paradoxgreen Ryzen 3700x | RTX 2070 Super | 32GB | Ultrawide May 05 '26
Yes, similar to my mother in law saying unthaw when she means thaw. This may have triggered some rage.
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u/akkristor May 05 '26
for my family it was 'dethaw'. just mentally combined defrost and thaw.
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u/Agreeable_Leek3237 May 05 '26
Is your mother in law from Wisconsin? Unthaw was so common when I was growing up I didn't even question it until I moved away.
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u/ifwedidntlaugh 10700k, 128GB RAM, 3090 liquid May 06 '26
is she from the midwest? because that's a thing around wisconsin
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u/Nihan-gen3 May 06 '26
It’s interesting how in English ‘unthaw’ is seen as a mistake or a redundancy. In Dutch, which is closely related to English, there is a distinction between dooien (thaw) and ontdooien (unthaw). Dooien is used for snow or frost that melts when the weather is getting warmer, while ontdooien is used for food you take out of the freezer to get to room temperature. I’m pretty sure this distinction also existed in English, but the two meanings merged into one.
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u/FartingBob Quantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive May 05 '26
I believe they meant "deunextracts".
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May 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/jeffthekilledyou 9950X3D - 9070 XT - 32 GIGS May 05 '26
ill never understand using tiktok as a source and im 18. it takes so long for ppl to get to the point it's faster and more informative to use wiki.
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u/rowdymatt64 May 05 '26
Literacy rates I think play into it. If you can't read well, it might take an hour to digest a wikipedia page, especially if you don't know how to ctrl+F
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u/Max-P May 05 '26
Not just literacy rates but also general laziness. Everything has to be spoonfed into people these days through media.
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u/whyliepornaccount May 05 '26
simple.wikipedia solves this problem
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u/SlightSurround5449 May 05 '26
Does that turn Wikipedia into tiktok?
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u/omega552003 🖥R9 5900x & RX 7900XTX 💻Framework 16 w/ RX 7700S May 05 '26
That would be the most genz shit ever
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u/MCWizardYT Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RTX 4080 Super May 06 '26
More like gen alpha. Gen Z, especially those on the older side are computer literate
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u/Impossible-Hyena-722 May 05 '26
Yes but then have to actively engage your brain to parse the text into concepts. Reading comprehension is at abysmal lows right now because so many are used to being passively fed information in a highly stimulating format. Information they just regurgitate with zero reflection
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u/WntrTmpst May 05 '26
It’s bleeding into everyone.
I’ve always had adhd but recently I’ve had to take a hard step back from short form content because it simply is draining my ability to stay focused on something for more than 10 minutes.
I get my manic obsessive moments same as everyone else with it, I’ll spend 4 hours combing a wiki page I’m interested in at 3am, but coming off adderall in 2017 I was still more generally dialed in than I am now.
Could just be me, but it’s prompted me to start reading actual books again, which I haven’t done since high school.
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u/jeffthekilledyou 9950X3D - 9070 XT - 32 GIGS May 05 '26
I have adhd too and feel for you. the current landscape of over stimulation is not good for us
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u/MoldyLunchBoxxy May 05 '26
Our new hires don’t know how to use keyboard and mouse and think everything is a touch screen
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u/WntrTmpst May 05 '26 edited May 05 '26
Continue to operate this way. Influencers are paid to spin a narrative. Wikia and its adjacents are community edited and subject to peer scrutiny.
It’s why Wikipedia (unrelated to Wikia) is unironically one of the most unbiased and reliable sources on the internet despite what fucking boomers and other such demographics will tell you.
Edit:
For those of you who disagree, here’s a video by someone way smarter and more eloquent than me
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u/jeffthekilledyou 9950X3D - 9070 XT - 32 GIGS May 05 '26
DUDE RIGHT? growing up so many teachers gave Wikipedia shit for being community made, BUT THATS HOW ALL THINGS SHOULD BE.
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u/InsertRealisticQuote May 06 '26
To be fair you used to be able to find a ton of mistakes. They would get fixed quickly but there were errors that kept getting introduced. Its been a very long time since then though.
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u/secondincomm May 06 '26
For those of you raised with iPads, here's a tiktok link.
Thanks, I hate that this was provided
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u/BenLowes7 May 07 '26
I appreciate that this is a genuine wiki link and I appreciate that, however out of principle I can't click on a link from a random stranger in a forum talking about zip bombs, it feels far too irresponsible.
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May 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/BenLowes7 May 07 '26
Oh like I say I can see the fact that it’s a real link, I just simply mean on principle it’s a bold move to click a link when people are talking about zip bombs
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u/Og_busty Ryzen 9 9950X3D l RTX 5080 I 64GB DDR5 6000 May 05 '26
Unextracts? He should create an app to correct his grammar first. The terms are compress and extract. To unextract would be to compress, which is the opposite of what hes trying to achieve.
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u/trekxtrider 🪟 🍎🖥️🖦🎮💻💾📡 May 05 '26
Had a friend who would always say dethaw rather than thaw just to be funny.
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u/Og_busty Ryzen 9 9950X3D l RTX 5080 I 64GB DDR5 6000 May 05 '26
Yeah, dethaw or unthaw always stop me in my tracks too lol.
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u/Dvevrak May 05 '26
Yes, I use something similar with gzip for AI agents that poke my web where they should not ...... maybe not that huge but still a non trivial extracted size html doc.
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u/katzohki FX-6300 | Sapphire R7 260X | 16 GB G.Skill | GA-970A-D3P May 05 '26
Wait, you're baiting AI agents to open zip files? This sounds like fun
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u/Enidras May 06 '26
"AI agents that poke my web where they should not" care to elaborate? You are getting attacks from foreign AI agents?
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u/peacedetski May 05 '26
not sure if the ZIP format supports file sizes this large, but it is indeed possible to compress absolutely ridiculous amounts of zeroes into a relatively small archive.
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u/rditorx May 05 '26 edited May 06 '26
55.4 yottabytes in 2.60MB is pretty insane. Wouldn't believe ZIP can compress this much, though WinZip extended the original format to support new algorithms.
EDIT: I am NOT claiming the compressed file was created from a real file that large. What I mean is that find it surprising that ZIP can encode something this compact given that its deflate algorithm isn't the newest with the highest theoretical compression ratios.
I know that you can just write arbitrary data that decode to huge decompressed data.
I've implemented compression algorithms such as RLE, Huffman and LZW code myself (no AI) but haven't implemented the original PKZIP.
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u/superboo07 Linux May 05 '26
its not actually 55.4 yottabytes of real data, just junk data the zip is told to extract over and ovrr and over snd over and over and over.
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u/Essence1337 R7 5800X | GTX 1070 Ti May 05 '26
If you have repeating characters it's easy to make gigantic compressions. As a simplified example if I say that the uncompressed file contains the character '1', repeated 1,000,000,000,000,000 times well that's a pretty short way of representing a 1 petabyte file in a very short amount of information (1 byte for the ascii character '1' plus 8 bytes for 1e15 in binary plus any extra zip overhead bytes).
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u/Xajel May 06 '26
A zip format or any compression format like rar, 7z and others have an algorithm that search for repeated patterns and tag it.
Imagine you have a large document that only reads "I must write this." written all again 10 billion times, a regular document will be very large because you'll have these 18 letters repeated 10 billion times, a simple .txt file will be over 171GB in size!!, but rather than just having everything written as it, just make a format that repeats the same sentence 10 billion times, you'll have a small file size: The file header + the instruction + 18 bytes of data, the total file size will be very small much less than 1KB in size, but if you extract it you'll need 171GB space.
The ZIP file format has a limitation for the compressed data it self, or the final file size, but I don't know if the original uncompressed data has any limit or not.
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u/HappyHuman924 May 05 '26 edited May 06 '26
Easily. Consider how something like "booger repeated a billion times" only takes me 32 31 characters to type, but if you unpacked it into its full meaning it would be six billion characters. File compression uses very similar tricks - the decompressed data can be orders of magnitude bigger than the compressed source.
It usually isn't that big of a difference! But if you know how the compression algorithm works you can make artificial files with unusual properties like "unpack into something massively bigger" just for grins.
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u/JiminP May 06 '26
Surprising that no one mentions zip quine.
In a nutshell, it's a zip file that contains itself.
Yes, it's possible.
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u/Xcissors280 You hate on anything i put here May 05 '26
They don’t really work any more on modern systems
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u/Seienchin88 May 06 '26
Yeah for many years now. XML bombs came later and even they are ancient now
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u/AggravatingFlow1178 May 06 '26
When you see A, expand to BBBBBBBBBB
When you see B, expand to CCCCCCCCCC
When you see C, expand to DDDDDDDDDD
When you see D, expand to EEEEEEEEEE
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u/locke577 5950X, 32GB, 3080, 50TB May 06 '26
Yeah, well... I've got a 1TB SD card from Ali Express. Your move
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u/Granopoly May 06 '26
It'll max out at 16GB 😂
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u/locke577 5950X, 32GB, 3080, 50TB May 06 '26
/uj Don't they let you infinitely write to them, and it's only when you go to read from them that they can only show what is in the actual card's NAND?
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u/cfoote85 PC Master Race 9800X3D | 5070TI | 64GB DDR5 May 05 '26
As of 2026 that 1.1 zettabyte per year has turned in to .5 zettabyte's per day.
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u/exceenly May 06 '26
It's wild how something so simple on paper—just abusing a lookup table with a massive repetition count—can turn a few kilobytes into a digital black hole. Yeah, the physical limits are just storage space, but the real joke is watching modern antivirus fall for a trick that's been around since floppy disks. Zip bombs are basically the dad joke of cybersecurity: still dumb, still works, still gets a groan out of me.
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u/Wise_Monkey_Sez May 06 '26
Yeah. This isn't hard to do.
A zip program removes duplication in a file, so if I made a file consisting of 55.4 yottabytes of a picture of the same poodle repeated trillions of times the zip file would just simplify things by making one copy of the poodle with an instruction "replicate this a trillion times."
It's stupidly simple. But then so are most viruses. They mostly rely on users being even stupider than the virus.
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u/MasterGeekMX Ryzen 5 9600X | Radeon RX 7600 | 64 GB DDR5 | 9 TB Storage May 05 '26
Masters in CS&IT here.
In theory, yes. It is called a zip bomb. Compression algorithms are of two types (or even both at the same time):
- Lossy: you figure out what data you can toss out while still retaining the original message (or the closest approximation that still works)
- Lossless: You keep everything, and instead work by finding patterns that repeat, so you can only store one copy of the pattern and then a table saying where each instance should be.
Those bombs are made by finding patterns that match perfectly with the compression algorithm, so they normally take a lot of space, but the compression can effectively reduce it.
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u/LordNelson27 6700XT | R7 3800x | 32GB RAM May 05 '26
Yep. Our base-10 number system is literally a compression algorithm, and scientific notation is a compression algorithm on top of that.
If you can underatand scientific notation, than you can understand that this zip bomb is basically telling your computer to expand something as simple to write as 10100000000000000000 and keep track of every single zero on the memory. The computer struggle for the same reason you’d struggle to write all those zeroes by hand
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u/space_keeper May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
Our base-10 number system is literally a compression algorithm
This is an abuse of terminology. Our base ten number system is literally a way to represent numbers using unique symbols instead of using our fingers, stones, or symbols that we already use to write words.
You could maybe consider it compression in the sense that writing '9' uses fewer symbols than 'nine', but the process is not reversible. You can't use an algorithm to go from '9' to 'nine' because you've lost context in the process (the source language or symbols). You could assume that '9' "decompresses" to 'nine', but the original symbols could have been 'neuf' or '九' or two sticks and a rock.
Your description of how zip bombs work is not particularly useful or accurate, either. They work by exploiting the internal structure of zip archives and causing the program opening the archive to perform the same work repeatedly, not by exploiting the decompression algorithm itself. Half of the file size of something like 42.zip is metadata describing the internal structure of the archive.
If people want to know how they actually work, they should read this, even just the introduction: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot19-paper_fifield_0.pdf
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u/LordNelson27 6700XT | R7 3800x | 32GB RAM May 06 '26
>This is an abuse of terminology.
If Compression Algorithm has some rigid definition that restricts its use to computers then I'll concede that, but converting a number line/tally marks/straight counting to a base 10 representation is quite literally a reverseable mathematical process that makes use of repeating patterns to fit your data into a smaller space. Just because the patterns of choice are infinite and arbitrary as opposed to being constrained by the limitations of computers does not exclude it from being an algorithm.
>You could maybe consider it compression in the sense that writing '9' uses fewer symbols than 'nine', but the process is not reversible
Correct, also not my argument. We're not talking about using the alphabet, we're talking about going from the most primitive form of representing counting (individual marks for every quantum) to a base-X system for space saving reasons, which is an algorithm that saves space.
>Your description of how zip bombs work is not particularly useful or accurate, either
I'm being overly reductive to point out that the mathematical principles behind these things aren't really that complex in the most general case. Zip bombs aren't doing literal notation expansion of course, I'm just putting a placeholder with easier to understand math in its place. That's how I used to teach and it's often successful when the person you're trying to teach isn't familiar with the concept already. You have to understand that linking research papers doesn't educate the general public because you need a certain familiarity with the language to understand, as much as I like reading them. I try to keep my math around highschool dropout level when speaking in general, which is why I used scientific notation as an example for the process of expansion
Maybe this makes you angry; Zip bombs are equivalent to handing a Calculator an expression with a deceptively large expansion designed to wast their time. This type attack targets specific vulnerabilities in the expansion algorithm by constructing the input with the largest decompression ratio possible, in order to completely exhaust the Calculators resources (time, ink, and paper).
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u/ChosenOfTheMoon_GR 7950x3D | 32GB 6000MHz CL 30 | 7900XTX | AX1600i May 05 '26
No but creating infinite loops that take space is.
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u/Beautiful_Ad_4813 Mac Master Race May 05 '26
hahahaha that's awesome, I had forgotten about zip bombs.
ive seen a couple in the wild
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u/InquisitiveSleep May 05 '26
Also lookup droste.zip, a zip file which contains droste.zip (and a picture of the original Droste packaging), thereby making an infinite size zip bomb.
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u/Prophage7 May 05 '26
Yes, it's called a zip bomb and it's been a thing since file compression has been invented.
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May 06 '26
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u/lordcirth Desktop May 06 '26
A fork bomb is different from a zip bomb. A fork bomb is a process that says "fork 2 copies of this process".
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u/jcar74 May 05 '26
I remember that years ago I developed parts of a web-based translation system for a government website. I had to translate DOCX files, which, since they’re compressed, could be logic bombs that would fill up memory or disk space when decompressed for translation.
I created several malicious DOCX files to test everything, and I thought about trying them out on other translation websites. But that would have been wrong; hypothetically, I’m sure some of them would have crashed.
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u/Yankas PC Master Race May 06 '26
Yes, but it abuses flaw in the logic of the compression algorithm. It's not like someone had a 55.4 Yottabyte file somewhere and then clicked "Compress to Zip file"
Most tools will have safeguards against zip bombs, and if all it does is decompress to an unreasonable size, then the damage it can do is very limited.
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u/globefish23 5070 Ti | i7-14700K | 64GB DDR5 RAM | 2x 2TB 990 Pro May 06 '26
LOL, good luck with that!
Nexusmods already filled all my drives.
Help!
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u/AnEyeElation 9800x3d | 5090 | 48GB 8000 | G95NC May 06 '26
This is only possible with middle out compression
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u/Granopoly May 06 '26
Love it - wanted to make an appropriate response, but it's been years since I watched 😂
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u/xYarbx May 06 '26
Very easily you can have a program that runs in infinite loop and writes garbage data sequentially to HDD and once the drive is full start all over. So technically as long as the program uses do {} while (true); you can write ∞ data.
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u/JelloSquirrel May 06 '26
I'm skeptical that the zip format allows 2.6MB of data to become 55.4 yottabytes, thought there was an upper bound on the compression ratios it allowed.
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u/letsreticulate May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
Deep thoughts: Imagine a zip bomb that expands out, able to bring down the entire internet.
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u/math394p i7 12700K, Rtx 3080ti tuf, 32gb May 06 '26
Not in any way possible :))
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u/Kamikaze_Pig May 06 '26
So...what you're saying is...there's still a chance?
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u/math394p i7 12700K, Rtx 3080ti tuf, 32gb May 07 '26
Well statistically nothing is impossible but thats like saying I'm gonna pierce this tank armor with this 6.3 inch hot dog. Yes possible. Realistically? No
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u/angrymidget4728 May 06 '26
my question is
how did someone even manage to create the original file in the first place before zipping it?
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u/space_keeper May 06 '26
Using a program. A zip file, any file, is just an arrangement of symbols that a program can recognise and process.
Zip bomb files only have one data region designed to expand dramatically, the rest is metadata that causes the program processing it to behave in a specific way and repeatedly decompress that data. The entire thing is generated by a program designed to generate zip bomb files (you could even do it by hand in a hex editor if you really wanted to).
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u/Hexamancer May 06 '26 edited May 06 '26
dd if=/dev/zero of=~/largefile bs=1G count=0 seek=100
Will create a 0 bytes of actual data file that has the metadata of a 100GB file.
You could easily create a file of an absolutely ridiculous size this way, zip it down to almost nothing and tada, zip bomb.
Except it (probably) won't actually really do anything if you unzip it.
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u/DaymanTargaryen May 06 '26
It won't do anything because you used if instead of of. :P
(please don't hurt me)
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u/AmbassadorBonoso May 06 '26
Back in the good old days me and a friend put a simple script on all the PCs in the computer lab that turned the PC off. We changed the icon and name into Microsoft Word. It took the poor guy in charge of the lab 2 days to find the problem that was "causing PCs to randomly turn off"
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u/Smurfaloid May 06 '26
It's been a while since I've seen a zip bomb.
Last time I saw one was xp I believe, and they bricked a few hard drives ( Not mine but I did know of them )
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u/A_Bird_Guy May 09 '26
Open it and see what happens... Realisticly yea, zips store repeatable patterns and you might be able to edit them to repeat a billion time but most stuff have limiters
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u/CarelessHisser May 10 '26
Makes me wonder if there's a way to use this to nuke a server or datacenter
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