A few nights ago a podcast featuring the infamous AOL-hacker Da Chronic showed up in my Twitter feed. The tweet and podcast didn’t garner a lot of attention, but Da Chronic and his 1995 app AOHell were legendary back in the day. With a set of features that allowed users to punt people offline, e-mail bomb, create fake accounts and more, AOHell caused untold amounts of chaos for AOL and its users. In the wake of its release it spawned a vibrant development community around creating “progs” – apps that augmented and added functionality to AOL (not all of these were for causing chaos, most were just for having fun). In fact, this site started as a Visual Basic help site for creating such apps. You can even still download the code generating API Spy I wrote back in the late 90’s, though unless you’re rocking Windows 98 it’s probably not going to be very useful.

The podcast touched on a lot of things I hadn’t thought about in years. I remember AOHell being a little too malicious for my tastes, but I hadn’t realized that it had invented phishing. That may have been one of the reasons my friends and I quickly moved onto other progs, as I vaguely remember thinking I might get in trouble for using such an app. But then again, by the time I got AOL (summer of 97) the scene was flooded with progs, so maybe we just moved on because there were so many choices. One thing I do remember though was that Da Chronic was long gone by the summer of 97. It was like he dropped an atom bomb on AOL and then peaced out. At least that’s what it seemed like from the perspective of my 15 year old self.

A decade ago I wrote about uncovering the identity of MaGuS, who’d written what most would say was the second most well known prog – Fate X. Fate X was like AOHell but without the quasi-illegal features (ie, the phisher and credit card faker). When I caught up with MaGuS he had become a successful developer at a large company. He seemed happy and it was apparent that being apart of the scene had been a positive experience for him. In contrast, Da Chronic’s experiences during this time period seemed to have left him paranoid and ultimately drove him away from a career in software. He also seemed somewhat guilt ridden over creating the first phishing app and coining the term for the attack. At one point he tried brushing this off by surmising that someone else would have invented the practice anyway if he hadn’t, but it still seemed to weigh on him as a blemish on his legacy.

Anyway, if you’re interested in computer security, were apart of the scene back in the day, or even if you’ve just made it this far into this blog post then I highly recommend the podcast below. It gives some great insight into one of the 90’s most infamous hackers. Even though I was more of a “white hat” progger I still owe a lot to this man. Before I stumbled into the AOL development scene I had been thinking of becoming a journalist. I can’t even imagine how different my life would be if I had taken that path.