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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.
When a process calls fork, it is deemed the parent process and the newly created process is its child. After the fork, both processes not only run the same program, but they resume execution as though both had called the system call. They can then inspect the call's return value to determine their status, child or parent, and act accordingly.
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]
Most Linux distributions are descended from other distributions, most being traceable back to Debian, Red Hat or Softlanding Linux System (see image right). Since most of the content of a distribution is free and open source software, ideas and software interchange freely as is useful to the individual distribution.
A timeline chart showing the evolution of Linux distributions, with each split in the diagram being called "a fork" In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software.
Starvation is usually caused by an overly simplistic scheduling algorithm.For example, if a (poorly designed) multi-tasking system always switches between the first two tasks while a third never gets to run, then the third task is being starved of CPU time.
Fork bomb: a similar method to exhaust a system's resources through recursion; Zip bomb: a similar attack utilizing zip archives; XML external entity attack: an XML attack to return arbitrary server files; Document type definition: a template for validating XML files
This had the same effect as a fork bomb, and crashed the computer several times. The main body of the worm can infect only DEC VAX machines running 4 BSD , alongside Sun-3 systems. A portable C "grappling hook" component of the worm was used to download the main body parts, and the grappling hook runs on other systems, loading them down and ...