Zip of death
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Zip of Death is a specially created computer file in the Zip format or some other compressed archive format and is used to crash or render useless the program or system reading it.
It was apparently first named in July 2001, but same sort of thing has been done on dialup bulletin board systems at least as long as compressing data archive programs have been around.
Usually a small file (up to a few hundred kilobytes), when the file is opened its description implies that its contents are inordinately large (e.g. terabytes), which is theoretically enough to crash the program or system reading it.
The Zip of Death was initially intended to cause trouble with unsuspecting users downloading the file, crashing anti-virus programs that scanned uploaded files, and to cause chaos in computer labs. Later the Zip of Death was used to crash anti-virus checkers on email systems, disabling them so that an infected file sent afterwards could get through.
Usually however, rather than allowing mail through unchecked, it resulted in effectively stopping mail to the target, either because the AV software was labouriously checking the entire large file and queueing up mail behind it, or the mail checker crashed altogether.
One example of a Zip of Death was the file "42.zip" which itself was 42 Kilobytes in size, but described a file 53,000 Terabytes in size.
