Fork Bomb

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What Does Fork Bomb Mean?

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).

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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