Zip bomb

It is often employed to disable antivirus software, in order to create an opening for more traditional malware.

[2] Most modern antivirus programs can detect zip bombs and prevent the user from extracting anything from it.

[3] A zip bomb is usually a small file for ease of transport and to avoid suspicion.

[5] In many anti-virus scanners, only a few layers of recursion are performed on archives to help prevent attacks that would cause a buffer overflow, an out-of-memory condition, or exceed an acceptable amount of program execution time.

[citation needed] Zip bombs often rely on repetition of identical files to achieve their extreme compression ratios.