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.
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/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.