Does anyone know what a 'decompression bomb' is?

quidsinquentin

I have Avast anti-virus on my PC, and in a routine scan it picked up a number of things on my sons partition - we run XP - including something called a 'decompression bomb' that it couldn't scan.

There were number of other things too, but this was the most unusual and there were several of them.

Any ideas anyone??

John_Gray

What does Google say when you do a search on "decompression bomb"?

John

moomintroll_3

Have a look here.

MadCowMan

Its less relevant these days ( due to having larger hard drives ), but it used to be a file that would expand to many thousands of times its size. It was usually designed to crash a machine by filling up the hard drive when an automatic process ( such as an AV scan ) opened it.