A PNG file with a corrupted header

About this file

A deliberately corrupted file, for verifying that your error handling and validation actually work.

In production you will genuinely receive files cut off mid-transfer, files partially lost to storage faults, and files whose extension is simply a lie. The question that matters is not only whether you detect the damage, but whether the application behaves safely once it has.

What to verify

• Validation detects the corruption and surfaces it as a handled error rather than an uncaught exception
• The message shown to the user does not leak an internal stack trace
• Temporary files and database rows are not left half-written when processing fails midway
• The log retains enough to diagnose the cause — file name, size, and what kind of anomaly was detected