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GZIP Logic bomb in Avast files

dave1933

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Posted March 7, 2013 at 11:40AM

System XP SP3. A couple of days ago I installed Iolo System Shield and following a scan it reported finding 5 copies of Gzip Logic Bomb in Windows\temp\avast. this seems rather strange. Can anyone suggest a reason for this. Avast (free) has been on the machine for about 2 weeks. Thanks Dave.

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted March 7, 2013 at 12:20PM

A zip bomb, also known as a Zip of Death or decompression bomb, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often employed to disable antivirus software to create an opening for more traditional viruses.

Rather than hijacking the normal operation of the program, a zip bomb allows the program to work as intended, but the archive is carefully crafted so that unpacking it (e.g. by a virus scanner in order to scan for viruses) requires inordinate amounts of time, disk space or memory.

from here

Avast opens files in a temporary directory to scan them that's why you are seeing them in that folder.

So you have had something nasty on your machine trying to get round Avast could have come from a wesite that Avast uesed its realtime scanner to look at any files attempting to be downloaded.

  1. look at the date of these files

  2. use something like CCleaner to regularly clean temporay files off your machine

I have run Avast for years without problems.

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lotvic

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Posted March 7, 2013 at 1:14PM

Fruit Bat /\0/\, Is it okay to run both programs? (Avast and iolo System Shield Antivirus) Won't that lead to problems?

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Fruit Bat /\0/\

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Posted March 7, 2013 at 1:35PM

Yes 2 antivirus can often see each others "viurs defitions" and call it up as a problem.

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