[KLUG Members] Fork Bomb in linux

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > You realize that an attacker would have to break into your machine in
> > order to fork bomb your computer, right?  If that happens, you have more
> > to worry about than someone doing a DoS on the box.
> I realize that however setting those values would also prevent a memory
> leak or a runaway process from bringing the machine to a halt

True, but new kernels are very agressive about killing processes if a memory
squeeze occurs - although they may not kill the processes you would choose to
kill.  ulimit is a better approach.

> > > It appearers that most out of the box Linux systems are vulnerable to
> > > this attack.  Here is the post from SUSE's security list.

True.  It should also be noted that this method can be used to bring down any
type of box, certainly including any version of Win32.