The term WinNuke refers to a remote denial-of-service attack (DoS) that affected the Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows NT and Microsoft Windows 3.1x operating systems.

The exploit sent a string of OOB (out of band) data to the target computer on TCP/IP port 139 (NetBIOS), causing it to lock up and display a blue screen of death , or BSoD. This did not cause any damage to, or change data on, the computer s hard disk, but any unsaved data would be lost.

A person under the screenname _eci published his Microsoft C programming language source code for the exploit on June 7, 1997. With the source code being widely used and distributed, Microsoft was forced to create security patches, which were released a few weeks later.

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