This is for the people who watch Silicon Valley. In Season 3 Episode 7, Gilfoyle sends a sort of recursive program to Gavin Belson’s laptop and cellphone which forces him to shut down the power at Hooli. Watch here. Such a program is called a zip bomb.

What it is basically is a huge file with dummy data compressed to many levels to generate a very small compressed file. For example in a test run, this script of mine generates a compressed file of size 30.58 KB which when decompressed is actually 10000000000 GB. This is done to drain out a computer’s memory until it shuts down. Read More on Wikipedia.

This is a small script written in Python which generates such a zip bomb.

zipbomb.py n_levels out_zip_file

python zipbomb.py 10 out.zip  

Compressed File Size: 30.58 KB  
Size After Decompression: 10000000000 GB  
Generation Time: 10.40s