bzip2 Archive Inflating to 1,400,000x its Size aka Decompression Bomb 

tar is not a compression algorithm, it's just for gathering together many files in one. That's why the file size didn't shrink.

Would be great having an ascii kitten. Lots of them. :) great video.

Oooooh. That sounds like a fun thing to do to the school computers.

3 pied Piper employees disliked the video

my school's IT guy watching me unload a 4000 terabyte zip bomb onto the school's network

Thank you so much for pointing out the "watch" command °_°

This very method was used to crash bulletin boards back in pre internet days. As the BBS would auto unzip to virus scan the file, it would full the hard drive and crash the BBS. Back in the day it was called a ascii bomb, they were easy to create because of stacker.

NULLS are NOT DATA!!! Why the surprise? If data is all the same, you only need to save one sample of data and how many of them are...

I just totally love your videos, short, enough detailed and to the point most importantly great content. Thanks!

Awesome. the Like button has been inflating to over 200 times its original size.

Please send to India, Tech support guys

you can shrink 10gb to 400 bytes and 100gb to 924 bytes if you use something like this: dd if=/dev/zero bs=2G count=5 | zip -q9 | bzip2 -cq9 > 10GB.zip.bz2

Please do a playlist on Bash Tutorial for Beginners, because I'm starting to feel like I should be migrating to Linux really soon

never trust internet kittens

Could you write the "bomb" by hand instead of waiting for the 6 hours to produce it by actually compressing data?

This is pretty much the digital version of the Spring Snake in a Can gag. As soon as you open it...

You could probably pipe through bzip2 _more than once_ since the data is so redundant. That generally doesn't work with more complex data. As someone else says, you could look into the bzip2 file format to see how to create an archive of zeros without having to use /dev/zero (Or use it and then hack the number to be bigger in the bzip2 file). Also, you might interested in lzma / xz and lrzip for heavy compression. (I have a 270 byte file that expands to 2.75GiB from combining these). Finally, look into archives that have been constructed to contain themselves. You read that right. Or two copies of themselves.

"Apparently this has been a known vulnerability for the last 12 years" what's exactly the vulnerability in this case? The compression algorithm is too efficient? :)

Would decompressing to a separate partition, i.e. /tmp, help prevent the rest of the system crashing?

Have you tried editing the bzip2 manually?

Fortunately it's a kitten, I'll be in danger if its a pupper

You can background a running command?! Am I the only one who didn't know that??

I installed a bomb file yesterday, that shit installed also malware, 30 other programs and fake antivirus. I am lucky that I am skilled with conputers and stopped the shit, cleaned the malware out the computer in less than an hour

I made a zip bomb that’s 80 ish mb when compressed and becomes 37 GB when extracted.

can you give us a practical video on virtual file system and virtual memory in linux..

It says Zip is the oldest file type. No wonder why misuse of compression exist. Why they didn't tell not to compress when there is a zip file in a file?

Seriously bad idea to share this or any nefarious how to. Shame on the mess.

online school shooters watching this video like

made a 64KB zip bomb which is 41GB uncompressed. It has 40GB.zip with 10 folders , each with 17 250MB .txt files, each compressed to 232B.

i made a 232B compressed file that becomes 250MB when uncompressed. I did this by pasting like too many zeroes into notepad and wating too long for it to respond.

You made a large file with the same character. Depending on the algorithm compression and how it recognizes a 'seed' string, all those procedures should compress to a single character. Since it didn't , there must be additional parameters to make these things work. Consider, if a Huffman scheme was properly and scholastically used, all files should have collapsed to a single character. Since it didn't there must be something else going on. Great video! Keep doing it!

i have a 10 exobyte zip bomb

I could watch you type Unix commands all day, very efficient and clever.

avast tagged quite some files on my pc as decompression bombs (even tho many look legit)

Yeah, but why?

bzip2 with just null/zero characters would be a nice prank... but to do a real test, is to use /dev/urandom

I would fall for cute kittens every time

Great video. Thanks for sharing!

Wow, fantastic really, keep the videos coming engineer man Cheers from Argentina

One more thing. Make a python program, that is a while loop. Inside loop make strings of size 100000 (length). Append that to a list. With each iteration of the loop, write that list into a file. I mean 10TB is not a small size. But as the above program will generate file of infinity size as time goes.

what do you code with?

i love your shit

I made a bat file that is only 16.0 KB but it can create a text file that is 2 exabytes (2048 petabytes) in size exactly, and any size in between.

what you used distribution ?

This is awesome!

wow

Im not really a linux guy so can someone tell me how to do this on windows? edit: already found out how

I tryed the same bzip2 command to compress a 826 MB iso file, however it only shark 2 MB , now it is 824 MB , how do I make it work? bzip2 is not working as shown in the video. Please help #Engineer_Man # Make a video on how to compress any kind of file with bzip2 that will compress any big files into couple of MB or KB, that would be very helpful.

Can you do this on windows with a tutorial?

bruh that's weak, i've made a decompression bomb of 8kB that decompresses to 32768 yB

We like to call it: Depression bomb