Freak out your Friends Using a Zip Bomb

20 June 2009 9 Comments Posted By Ashik

A zip bomb, also known as a Zip of Death, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often used by virus writers to disable antivirus software, so that a more traditional virus sent afterwards could get into system undetected. A zip bomb is usually a small file (up to a few hundred kilobytes) for ease of transport and to avoid suspicion. However, when the file is unpacked its contents are more than the system can handle.You can make your own zip bomb to annoy your friends or just out of curiosity (or wilderness) to experiment with it. Make sure you don’t detonate it on yourself.

Here is how to make your own Zip Bomb of Death -

Create a new text file,name it a.txt
Open and type the null character (alt + 255) in it.
Now press Ctrl + A then Ctrl + V a couple times to make some null bytes.
Open Command prompt and navigate to the folder containing a.txt . Type the following command:

copy /b *.txt b.txt

This will write all the contents of a.text and its copies into a new text file called b.txt,hence making every copy is a super copy. Repeat the above steps from the beginning again and again to make a really big text file.

Once u have a nice empty big text file like 1gb or more,then compress it using Winrar or Winzip into a zip file.

You will find that it will be compressed to very small size (about 1MB ). It is because of the simple construction of the file as the text file contains 1gb of null bytes.

Make sure that YOU DONT OPEN THIS afterwards.

You can make the same file in Linux by typing -

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000 count=1000000 | gzip > test.gz

Send it to your friends (or foes) and it will definitely annoy them . Use some creativity and rename the text file into some thing like Angelina Jolie.jpg and compress it and email to your friends. Once they download it,they will never be able to download again (sarcasm..sarcasm).More disastrous combinations can be made by experimenting with it.I mean..you get the idea

If you are too lazy like me and you don’t want to do all this then you can download the most dangerous zip bombs of all time from here. This size of this zip is only 42 KB which will uncompress to about 4 Petabytes (1 Peta byte = 1024 TB and 1 TB = 1024 GB ) of file size. Dangerous huh..?

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9 Comments »

mamad said:

thank you my friend…

# 21 June 2009 at 8:58 am

lokesh said:

hiii..
# Open and type the null character (alt + 255) in it.
# Now press Ctrl + A then Ctrl + V a couple times to make some null bytes.

nothing is happening while typing alt+255
and by second step too.

and while typing this in command prompt:copy /b *.txt b.txt
where is a.txt in this.

and malware is showing in the given 42kb txt file.

# 21 June 2009 at 8:50 pm

Bamchi said:

you need to hold down the Alt key and type 255…. an invisible character will be pasted…. copy and paste this character many times…. then close the document… duplicate that document so you have a.txt and b.text and then open dos promt and type

“copy a.txt+b.txt ”

regards

# 13 February 2010 at 6:37 pm

Allstarx said:

if u know to operate cmd then only u can make it….

# 20 June 2010 at 5:17 pm

fred said:

nice

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num+2347064464016

# 23 July 2010 at 5:26 am

artist said:

nice post!!!
for automation and ease u can use following c++ code for creating as many text files as u want with random names
note : for loop of 50000 will not create 50,000 files it will only create 5-6 thousand files or it may depend upon ur processor speed
feel free 2 inc. the number from 50,000 to anything,
may take 20-25 min

//////////////////copy from here////////////////////////////
#include
#include
using namespace std;
int main()
{
char CharValue=char(0);
// For creating the text file names a.txt
ofstream a_file(“a.txt”,ios::app);
for( int i=0;i<1000;i++)
{
a_file<<CharValue;
}
a_file.close();
//Copy a.txt into 100 new file whose name is generated by //random number
cout<<"Creating bomb :"<<"\n";
for(long j=0;j<500000;j++)
{
std::system("copy a.txt %random%.txt");
cout<<"file no : "<<j;
}
cin.get();
return 0;
}

///////created by [email protected]////////////

# 17 October 2010 at 1:16 am

artist said:

in above example:

include iostream.h and fstream.h as header files.

# 17 October 2010 at 1:21 am

Crocodile said:

Just to let you know, Alt+255 does NOT (and should not) give a NULL character. Null character is 0×00 (0) and not 0xFF (255)

For 0×00 you can use a hex editor and then do all those copying steps (in Notepad++ since it displays null characters as ‘NUL’) or just open an EXE using Notepad++ and copy a NUL byte from it and Ctrl+V into an empty text file until you obtain a suitable length.

# 31 December 2010 at 11:14 am

Lance said:

Ok, I’m totally new to this but, heck, i really want to learn to understand and perform stuff like this. Any tips on how to get started?

# 28 April 2011 at 1:44 pm

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Introducing Myself

My name is Ashik a.k.a. "Hungry Hacker". I am student of Computer Engineering from Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmedabad. I am addicted to Internet and always in search of Hacks. According to me,

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