The AOL hacking tool that invented phishing and inspired a generation

If you were a teenager on America Online in the mid-’90s, there’s a good chance you got it. Unlike a lot of the files flying around the early warez scene, this one wasn’t a piece of pirated software like Photoshop 3.0 or a beta of Windows 95. It was a small Windows add-on program for AOL, and it wasn’t made by a software company, but by a hacker calling themselves “Da Chronic.” When you launched it, the title screen depicted the giant disembodied head of AOL CEO Steve Case floating in a sea of flames, set to a funky excerpt of Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” The title, rendered in 3D, spelled out just how far outside of the known, pixelated world you had come: “AOHell.”

In 1995, AOL was how most people in America were getting online, most of them for the very first time. Dialing in over landlines on 14.4 or 28.8 kbps connections, what you heard when you logged on was “Welcome!” and “You’ve got mail!”—as if the internet was your new home away from home. And yet, while it began offering access to the nascent World Wide Web that year, AOL itself wasn’t really the internet; it was more like a walled, manicured garden, with a set of cheery web-page-like brand-filled spaces known as “keywords” and a growing warren of official and unofficial chatrooms. Its blinkered vision of the internet made it, as some have noted, the Facebook of its time.

This story is part of 1995 Week, where we’ll revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago.

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