Tech Byte 4 U|Only 5 Characters are enough to Crash a System: Fork Bomb

Only 5 Characters are enough to Crash a System: Fork Bomb

Sunday, August 29, 2010|

Surbhi Verma

A fork bomb for crashing system is a smallest writable virus as it contains on 5 Characters. Fork bombs count as wabbits: they typically do not spread as worms or viruses.

The concept behind the fork bomb: the processes recursively fork until a denial of service or a crash occurs. Fork Bomb creates a large number of processes very quickly and break the limitation of processes that can run on a system. It's dead simple: A program just replicate itself, which again replicate itself and so on until all resources are exhausted.

A fork bomb generally creates two instances at startup, further each of created processes creates two instances and so on…The processes recursively fork; this “forks” the processor and jamm it completely until a crash occurs. It use forks to do system crash, so its called Fork Bomb.

See, How to create it:

1. Fork Bomb for windows:
Write the following code in notepad and save it with bat extension say fork.bat