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The concept behind a fork bomb — the processes continually replicate themselves, potentially causing a denial of service. In computing, a fork bomb (also called rabbit virus) is a denial-of-service (DoS) attack wherein a process continually replicates itself to deplete available system resources, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.
The project's name: "The Project Formerly Known as Kindle Forkbomb" can be broken down to better understand the meaning behind the work. Forkbomb is a term used in computing, describing an attack in which a computer process continuously self-replicates until the machine's resources are depleted or the system crashes.
The Rabbit (or Wabbit) virus, more a fork bomb than a virus, is written. The Rabbit virus makes multiple copies of itself on a single computer (and was named "rabbit" for the speed at which it did so) until it clogs the system, reducing system performance, before finally reaching a threshold and crashing the computer. [10]
I do not think the Java Applet example is a fork bomb: 1) It does not spawn processes. 2) Even if you are liberal and define a "new thread" to count as a "new process", this example's new threads do not spawn new threads themselves, which is the signature "forking" element of the fork bomb.
Attacks may use specific packet types or connection requests to saturate finite resources by, for example, occupying the maximum number of open connections or filling the victim's disk space with logs. An attacker with shell-level access to a victim's computer may slow it until it is unusable or crash it by using a fork bomb.
Instead, he programmed the worm to copy itself 14% of the time, regardless of the status of infection on the computer. This resulted in a computer potentially being infected multiple times, with each additional infection slowing the machine down to unusability. This had the same effect as a fork bomb, and crashed the computer several times.
The example attack consists of defining 10 entities, each defined as consisting of 10 of the previous entity, with the document consisting of a single instance of the largest entity, which expands to one billion copies of the first entity. In the most frequently cited example, the first entity is the string "lol", hence
Fork bomb principle. The processes are recursively forked, resulting in a saturation of the available ressources and denial of service. Date: 11 February 2007: Source: