Security News > 2023 > March > How to prevent fork bombs on your Linux development servers

A fork bomb is a form of denial-of-service attack that uses the fork operation, which is executed recursively and can consume all system resources.

How do you prevent this from happening? You lower the number of processes allowed on your Linux server.

It's actually really simple to do, but you can't lower the number too much, otherwise you might find your system unusable.

How do you lower the number of allowed processes? Let me show you.

First, let's check to see how many processes are allowed on your system by running the command ulimit -u. If you see 128,038, your system could be vulnerable to a fork bomb.

Congratulations, you've just protected your Linux development system from fork bombs.

News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-prevent-fork-bombs-linux-servers/