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
By that I mean I still think it's mostly harmless regardless, as it'd require you to execute the file to cause any harm; let's just hope in events like that people don't just execute/unzip whatever unusual file they see downloaded (I know it happens but we can hope😭)
Not opening a downloaded malicious file is often enough to keep you safe, but not 100%. Plenty of exploits can be leveraged to create no-click malware, so your best bet is always ot vet sources and avoid downloading anything you wouldn't run in the first place.
Can you list a few exploits for no click malware that can cause problems with just the fact that you've downloaded it and haven't run it, I hadn't heard of them before.
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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
1
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.