The legend begins with a user on an anonymous board (often cited as /x/ or /v/) claiming to have found an old backup drive from a defunct research facility. Among the standard directories was a single, 4-kilobyte file named cfg_1.zip . When the user tried to extract it, their system reported that the archive contained over of data—a physical impossibility for a file that small. The Contents

Those who claimed to have successfully bypassed the "zip bomb" protection described a single text file inside, usually titled manifest.txt or core_config.sys . The contents weren't code, but rather:

Technically, "zip bombs" (like 42.zip) do exist and can crash systems by expanding into massive amounts of data, which likely inspired the technical part of the story.

In the real world, cfg_1.zip is widely considered a or a piece of "unfiction."