While modern computers won't "explode," attempting to unzip this file will quickly fill a hard drive to capacity or cause the extraction software (and potentially the OS) to hang or crash.

Traditionally, zip bombs were used to target antivirus software . When a scanner tries to "look inside" the archive to check for viruses, it might attempt to decompress the layers, exhausting the system's memory or CPU. Useful Blog Posts & Resources

It uses recursive compression . The main file contains 16 zipped files; each of those contains another 16, and so on, through five layers. The final layer contains a single 4.3 GB file filled entirely with zeros.