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

The legendary is a classic example of a zip bomb (or "decompression bomb"), a malicious archive designed to crash or disable a system by overloading its resources during extraction. What is 42.zip?

It is a tiny ZIP file, only in size, that contains an astronomical amount of data—roughly 4.5 petabytes (4,500 terabytes)—when fully uncompressed.

For a deeper dive into how this works and its modern evolutions, these posts are excellent resources: What Is a Zip Bomb? Defending Against Decompression Attacks