Fork Bomb
A fork bomb is a DOS (Denial of Service) attack against Linux or Unix-based system.
A fork bomb is nothing than a bash function that get executed recursively in order to slow down or crash a system.
Preventing Fork Bomb
You can get the current maximum process you can run in linux by typing $ ulimit -u
or $ ulimit -a
.
$ ulimit -u
63020
The number 63020
indicates that you can run 63020 processes. To protect your linux system from a fork bomb, you need
to lower that number:
$ ulimited -S -u 5000
This command sets to 5000
the maximum number of processes you can run into your system.