AOHell

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AOHell was a tool that greatly simplified 'cracking' online using AOL. It can be used as an insulting reference to AOL.

Released in 1994 by a hacker known as "Da Chronic", AOHell provided a number of utilities which ran on top of the America Online client software. Though most of these utilities simply manipulated the AOL interface, it was powerful enough to let any curious party anonymously cause havoc on AOL. Upon loading, the program played a short clip from the song Nuthin' But a "G" Thang.

AOHell was the first program of its kind. It spawned a very large number of copycats, some of which rivaled AOHell itself in quality. Some notable names were: AOKiLLa/Rampage (SuKiYaKi), LuciferX (NailZ, major rival to AOHell), TOStitos (Nazareth), AOHades (Cybermun), EViL Advantage, America Offline, AODemon, AOLSD, and countless others most of which were sub-standard quality using source codes that were often passed around.

For a long list of programs: http://members.fortunecity.com/xxoveridexx/aolproggies.htm (mostly dead links)

Some of the features included were:

A fake account generator which would generate a new, fully-functional AOL account for the user that lasted for about 4 to 5 weeks. This generator worked by exploiting the algorithm used by credit card companies known as the Luhn algorithm to dynamically generate apparently legitimate credit card numbers. The account would not be disabled until AOL first billed it (and discovered that the credit card was invalid). The generator could also generate fake addresses and phone numbers, and at first-glance, the area codes and zip codes would appear to match real area codes and zip codes for the cities and states of the fake addresses;
Phishing tools, which would barrage random AOL users with messages like "Hi, this an AOL Customer Service. We're running a security check and need to verify your account. Please enter your username and password to continue." in the hope that victims would inadvertently give the phishers access to their accounts;
An 'IM-bomb', which would spam another user with instant messages until AOL signed them off;
A mail bomb script which would rapidly send e-mails to a user's inbox until it was full;
A flooding script that would flood a chat room with ASCII art of an offensive nature, such as the finger or a toilet;
An 'artificial intelligence bot', which did not really contain artificial intelligence, but had the ability to automatically respond to a message in a chatroom upon identification of keywords (for example, a 'profane language' autoresponse was built-in to the program);
An 'IM manager', which provided facilities to automatically respond to or block IMs from certain users;

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 'wArEzXXX', AOHell created bots which would send out a list of warez (pirated 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 your 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.

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 [1], 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 pornography. Da Chronic claimed when he confronted AOL's TOSAdvisor about it, he was met with an account deletion. His goal was to have "20,000+ idiots using AOHell to knock people offline, steal passwords and credit card information, and to basically annoy the hell out of everyone". The program was last compatible with AOL version 2.5.