What Is a Fork Bomb? How to Protect Yourself from Fork Bombs? - MiniTool

Many people are interested in the fork bomb virus and wonder about the best way to protect themselves from the attack. In this article on MiniTool Website, we will clarify this annoying virus attack for you and present effective ways to protect your data.

What Is a Fork Bomb?

What is a fork bomb? The fork bomb can be also called rabbit virus or wabbit. This kind of attack is attributed to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Just as other kinds of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, fork bomb attacks can flood the target with traffic or send it information that triggers a crash.

What’s special is that the fork bomb code creates a copy of a program. Once the new instance is running, the fork bomb happens again. This process can happen indefinitely or until it exhausts all available memory.

This process just uses up your RAM so no genuine processes can take place. This attack can be carried out on all operating systems, such as Windows, Unix, Linux, or Unix-like operating systems, slowing down or crashing the system due to resource starvation.

How to Avoid Fork Bomb Attacks?

Since the fork bomb malware poses a great danger to users’ systems, is there any useful way that can help prevent fork bombs?

Of course yes. There are two important things to ensure that a fork bomb is less likely to take your system down.

• Limit the maximum number of processes a single user can own and limit memory use per process
• If you have already suffered the hit, you will need to reset your server and remove every instance of the code to make the attack stop.

Some of you may need professional help to return from the fork bomb attack.

Besides, you may want to do something to prevent the attack and the first thought would come to antivirus. However, considering the features of the fork bomb virus, traditional antivirus can’t completely protect you from that.

If you come under such an attack, your antivirus software can warn you because it will recognize this vector, but you are still in danger of unknown malware.

Here, we would like to provide another way to minimize the loss – back up your system to an external hard drive.

Since, in most cases, fork bombs are designed to crash systems, apart from the above two tips we mentioned to try stopping the attack, you can have a system backup plan for a guarantee.

MiniTool ShadowMaker is free backup software with a one-click system backup solution. The whole process is easy and quick with more features and functions you can enjoy.

Get this program downloaded and installed and you can enjoy a 30-day free trial version.

Step 1: Connect your external hard drive, open the program, and click Keep Trial.

Step 2: Go to the Backup tab. The backup source has been selected as system-related partitions and you just need to change your backup destination to your external hard drive.

Step 3: Then click Back Up Now.

Bottom Line:

This article has given you a detailed introduction to the fork bomb virus attack. You can take notice of the signs and prepare a backup plan for your important data in advance to minimize the dangers if, unfortunately, suffering the attack.

If you need any help with MiniTool ShadowMaker, you can leave your messages below.

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