Blue Bomb

What Does Blue Bomb Mean?

Blue bomb is a slang term for a specific kind of denial of service attack that results in a blue screen of death, a Windows operating system screen showing that the system has crashed. A blue bomb is also known as WinNuke, and it involves sending an out-of-band packet that the operating system is not able to process.

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Techopedia Explains Blue Bomb

Blue bombs started with early versions of the Windows operating system, such as Windows 95 and Windows NT. It was often used by game players and IRC chat participants, and was easily sent to other computers to crash a system. The blue bomb sent an “urgent pointer” which the operating systems did not handle correctly. It attacked a computer through port 139.

Over time, Windows released patches and addressed the problem with blue bombs. Later in the early years of the millennium, experts suggested that a new version of WinNuke was affecting systems such as Windows 2000 and XP. The new version used port 139 as well as port 445. Windows also sent patches for this version. In addition, Internet service providers began to find ways to disrupt the transmission of these destructive packets.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…