Traditionally, zip bombs were used to target antivirus software . When a scanner tries to "look inside" the archive to check for viruses, it might attempt to decompress the layers, exhausting the system's memory or CPU. Useful Blog Posts & Resources
The legendary is a classic example of a zip bomb (or "decompression bomb"), a malicious archive designed to crash or disable a system by overloading its resources during extraction. What is 42.zip? 42.zip
While modern computers won't "explode," attempting to unzip this file will quickly fill a hard drive to capacity or cause the extraction software (and potentially the OS) to hang or crash. Traditionally, zip bombs were used to target antivirus