Zip of death

Zip of Death is a specially created computer file in the Zip format, used to crash or render useless the program or system reading it.

It was first reported in July 2001.

Usually a small file (up to a few hundred kilobytes), when the file is opened its description implies that its contents are inordinately large (e.g. terabytes), which is theoretically enough to crash the program and or system reading it.

The Zip of Death was initially designed to crash anti-virus checkers on email systems, disabling them so that an infected file sent afterwards could get through.

Usually however, rather than allowing mail through unchecked, it resulted in effectively stopping mail to the target, either because the AV software was labouriously checking the entire large file and queueing up mail behind it, or the mail checker crashed altogether.

One example of a Zip of Death was the file "42.zip" which itself was 42 Kilobytes in size, but described a file 53,000 Terabytes in size.

External links

• Link to 42.zip on SecurityFocus.com
• Link to July 2001 story from TheRegister.co.uk