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
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. 42.zip
For a deeper dive into how this works and its modern evolutions, these posts are excellent resources: What Is a Zip Bomb? Defending Against Decompression Attacks Traditionally, zip bombs were used to target antivirus
It is a tiny ZIP file, only in size, that contains an astronomical amount of data—roughly 4.5 petabytes (4,500 terabytes)—when fully uncompressed. only in size