what's a "decompression bomb"??

DaRuSsIaMaN

Geek Comrade
I did an avast antivirus scan and had none, but at the end I had a lot of files that were unable to be scanned for various reasons. Among those listed, a couple of them were unscannable because they were decompression bombs. Can anyone tell me what that means?
 
A Decompression Bomb is a compressed-format file that expands to fill your disk when opened.

For example, using GZIP to repeatedly compress a specific byte stream in three stages can result in a file of only 5928 bytes that when expanded is 100 gigabytes! Other file formats that use compression are vulnerable as well, for example a GIF file that represents a 6000 x 6000 black rectangle compresses down to 25527 bytes but will expand to over 100 megabytes when represented as a 24-bit image.

The bomber sends you an email with a compressed attachment designed to choke a virus scanner or the like.

Don't open them unless you're sure about their source! If downloaded with p2p software you should be really carefull with these files. I suggest you delete them asap.
 
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