Notability and origin
Most notably, the program included a function for stealing the passwords of America Online users and, according to its creator, contains the first recorded mention of the term "phishing". AOHell provided a number of other utilities which ran on top of the America Online client software. Though most of these utilities simply manipulated the AOL interface, some were powerful enough to let almost any curious party anonymously cause havoc on AOL. The first version of the program was released in 1994 by hackers known as The Rizzer, and The Squirrel. Upon loading, the program played a short clip from Dr. Dre's 1993 song Nuthin' but a "G" Thang.
Competitors
AOHell was the first program of its kind, but it spawned a very large number of copycats, some of which rivaled AOHell itself in quality. Fate X and HaVoK were two of its most popular successors. As time went on, code to create these programs became available to the general public on various AOL add-on sites. New programs would be developed and released regularly by the community of coders that sites like this fostered. Over a period of 10 years, more than 1000 programs would be released for various versions of AOL.
Features of AOHell
Motives and legacy
The existence of AOHell and similar software even allowed AOL to develop its own warez community. Lurking in secret chat rooms with appropriate names like 'AirZeraw', mm, cerver, 'wArEzXXX', g00dz, 'punter', 'gif', 'coldice' 'GRiP' as well as 'trade' to name a few chatrooms, AOHell created bots often referred to as 'servers' which would send out a list of warez (illegally copied software) contained in their mailbox. Simply messaging the bot with the titles of the desired software packaging would result in those packages being forwarded to one's mailbox. Since the data merely had to be copied into another user's mailbox (still resident on an AOL server), the piracy was only limited by how fast messages could be forwarded, with AOL footing all the bandwidth costs. One additional limitation included an allotted amount of email messages which could be sent per day by the particular user account. Botters were able to circumvent this limitation by signing up for a white-list account which was subject to an unknown probationary period where AOL administrators monitored the account.
The existence of software like AOHell provided a sort of parallel 'lite' version of the hacker underground that had existed for years before, based around bulletin board systems. Programs like AOHell played an important part in defining the 'script kiddie', a user who performs basic cracking using simple tools written by others, with little understanding of what they are doing. These types of programs tended to get AOL accounts shut down and so most users were on accounts they acquired illicitly either by phishing or a fake account generator as mentioned above.
In the manual, the creator of AOHell claims that he created the program because the AOL administrators would frequently shut down hacker and warez chatrooms for violation of AOL's terms of service while refusing to shut down the pedophilia chat rooms which regularly traded child pornography. Da Chronic claimed that when he confronted AOL's TOSAdvisor about it, he was met with an account deletion:
He also stated that his goal was:
The program was last compatible with AOL version 2.5.