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A fork bomb is a denial of service category in which system resources are depleted by a continuous process. This simple form of malware attacks by creating multiple copies of itself.
The attack is based on two factors: consume the central processing unit time using forking and create a saturation in the process table of the operating system (OS).
A fork bomb is also known as a wabbit or rabbit virus.
Techopedia Explains Fork Bomb
A simple example of a fork bomb is the the infinite loop, which continuously repeats the same process in a system environment.
When the saturation level is fully achieved in the process table, it is a difficult task to develop a program to isolate a fork bomb. Another difficulty is the amount of time it takes to locate and terminate fork bombs before more copies are created.
A common method used to halt a fork bomb is limiting the number of processes, which is achieved by using different methods with different operating systems (OS).
