Stop Malicious Bots with Zip Bombs

Most web traffic doesn’t come from real people typing away. It’s mostly bots—those tireless computer programs constantly crawling everywhere. Some are okay, like the ones that grab RSS feeds, search engines that keep track of what’s new, and even the AI scrapers gathering text to train those big language models. But there are also some bad ones mixed in, like spammers, content thieves, and hackers.

I used to work at a place where a bot found a hole in our WordPress setup, snuck in some bad code, and used our server to launch attacks. Before that, one of my first sites got kicked off Google because bots flooded it with fake spam. These weren’t just little annoyances; they felt like losing important parts of my online presence. I needed a way to fight back, and I found a strange solution: zip bombs.

Implementing robust defenses against malicious bots is key, and just as important is equipping your server with the right foundational tools from the start, as highlighted in our guide on the Best Software for VPS Server: 7 Essential Tools for Beginners (2026 Guide).

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How Compression Works—and How to Mess With It

A zip bomb looks harmless. It’s just a small compressed file that, when you open it, turns into something huge—big enough to eat up all your memory and crash your computer.

Compression has been key to the web from the start. Back when everyone used dial-up, every little bit of data counted. A 50 KB HTML file could become 10 KB, saving precious seconds. Something that took twelve seconds could now arrive in three. Gzip, which is quick and simple, became the way things were done for speed on the web.

The same goes for CSS, JavaScript, and even images. When your browser asks for a webpage, it tells the server what it can handle:

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

If the server agrees, it sends the content squeezed down, making it fast and easy to transfer.

Bots, because they’re always hungry for more data, jump on this. They want to grab as much stuff as they can, using as little resources as possible. What’s funny is that this is also their weak spot.

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Using Compression Against the Bots

My blog gets scanned for weaknesses all the time. Most of it is just background noise. But when some bots start trying to inject code or find holes, I don’t block them. Instead, I’m nice to them.

I send a 200 OK message.

Then I give them a gzip file.

The file is usually between 1 MB and 10 MB, depending on how much I think the bot can handle. After they take it, I don’t usually see that IP address again. It’s not magic; it’s just how things work.

Content-Encoding: deflate, gzip

The bot sees the header and starts to decompress the file. That 1 MB file starts growing. And growing. And growing—like a never-ending digital balloon. One megabyte turns into one gigabyte. The memory fills up. The bot crashes.

For those bots that just won’t quit, I use a 10 MB file. When it decompresses, it explodes into 10 GB. This usually wipes out most simple bots almost instantly.

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Making the Bomb

Be careful: if you’re not careful, this can mess up your own system. You need to be precise.

Here’s the command I use to create a 10 GB bomb:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1G count=10 | gzip -c > 10GB.gz

Let’s break it down:

• dd is a command that copies or converts data.
• if=/dev/zero tells it to use a special source that just spits out zeros.
• bs=1G tells dd to work in 1-gigabyte chunks.
• count=10 limits it to ten chunks, making 10 GB of data filled with zeros.

Then, we pipe that into gzip, which squeezes down the data really well because it’s all the same. The result is a file that’s about 10 MB, but it turns into 10 GB when you try to unpack it.

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Choosing When to Blow It Up

On my server, a program checks all incoming requests for anything suspicious. I have a list of bad IP addresses that I’ve seen scanning for problems. I also look for strange behavior, like spammers who post stuff and then keep coming back to check on it. That’s a big giveaway.

When a request looks suspicious, I do this:

if (ipIsBlackListed() || isMalicious()) {
    header(Content-Encoding: deflate, gzip);
    header(Content-Length: + filesize(ZIP_BOMB_FILE_10G)); // 10 MB
    readfile(ZIP_BOMB_FILE_10G);
    exit;
}

No big drama. No blocking. Just a normal-looking response that hides a dangerous surprise.

The only thing I pay for is sending that 10 MB file. If traffic gets crazy, I switch to the 1 MB version, which is still pretty bad for those bots.

While you’re figuring out how to keep those pesky malicious bots off your site, it makes sense to also think about securing something else — your financial future.

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Be Realistic and Careful

Zip bombs aren’t perfect. Smart bots can spot them and avoid them. They might only read part of the file to get around the trap. It’s not a perfect solution.

But for simple bots that are just blindly grabbing stuff from the web—the ones wasting bandwidth and slowing things down—it works pretty well. It’s not a strong defense, but more like a tripwire: simple, fast, and often does the trick.

If you’re curious, you can see zip bombs working in my server logs. The pattern is clear. A request comes in. A compressed file goes out. Then silence.

Sometimes, you don’t need to fight with strength. Sometimes, you can use the enemy’s own tricks against them.

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FAQ

Source: PatientZero