Know This Term : “Decompression Bomb”
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Yeah really! Just a couple minutes ago, I was running a full system scan with my avast! Antivirus; no malware was found (as usual!), but there was something really funny (or really dangerous) in the results log. Check out the screenshot yourself :
I had never heard of this term of before so I immediately fired up a Google search. This is what Wikipedia has to say about these cyber bombs :
A decompression bomb is a type of denial-of-service attack, in which a small compressed file expands to an enormous size, requiring large amounts of system resources and possibly causing the software or the entire system to hang. All major web browsers are vulnerable to the attack, which may be launched merely by visiting a malicious website using the standard gzip transfer encoding.
These definitely seem to be severe problems, but I have little to worry because the ‘bombs’ in my PC are just the Linux ISO files (the last things you would associate the term ‘malware’ with). However if you encounter real decompression bomb files in your PC, make sure you delete those immediately; because the next time you try, it might have already exploded!
As if nuclear bombs weren’t enough trouble already…
I came upon this while searching for what people have to say about decompression bombs. I wanted to lend a quick description. Avast thinks that those are decompression bombs thanks to squashfs. Squashfs is a highly efficient real-time compression file system. It is used to make Linux live CD’s because the Kernel supports on-the-fly decompression. Squash allows a 700 megabyte CD to hold roughly two gigabytes of software. To Avast, this high compression ratio appears to be a decompression bomb
Thank you for explaining, Daniel. :]
Ashutosh Mishra´s last blog ..Block spyware, adware, and bad sites with SpywareBlaster