Today, most antivirus programs can detect whether a file is a zip bomb and so avoid unpacking it.

A ZIP bomb is a variant of mail-bombing.

A zip bomb, also known as a Zip of Death or decompression bomb, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render the program or system reading it useless.

Rather than hijacking the normal operation of the program, a zip bomb allows the program to work as intended, but the archive is carefully crafted so that unpacking it (e.g. by a virus scanner in order to scan for viruses) requires inordinate amounts of time, disk space or memory.