Don't miss an insight. Subscribe to Techopedia for free.

Subscribe
Advertisements

Fork Bomb

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.

Advertisements

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).

Advertisements

Related Terms