AOHell was a
Visual Basic program written by
Da Chronic in the early
90's. It was supposed to expose
security holes in
AOL. Though a lot of it just automatically
spammed
chat rooms and
IMs with elaborate
ASCII drawings, it did have some features that gave AOL a
headache. Among them was an automatic
Phisher, which would IM many people at once pretending you worked for AOL and needed their
password for
official reasons. This combined with a lot of
newbies to the online world led to many stolen accounts. This doesn't seem so bad today, but this was back then AOL charged
by the hour. Imagine
script kiddies, except they don't even need the technical knowlege to get on IRC.
AOHell could also automatically generate a fake account with random credit card numbers. It also let you download and chat without being charged for time spent online. Ironically, AOL would later use these ideas themselves.