Buzz
Phishing attacks today can strike anywhere, from your Gmail inbox to your text messages. However, when the term phishing was first introduced, it referred to a specific platform: AOL.
It all began in 1994 when a group of hackers from across the U.S. started posing as AOL support staff in private chats, tricking unsuspecting users into revealing their login credentials and credit card details. The hackers were primarily motivated by a desire to use AOL without paying for their own accounts. Koceilah Rekouche, a 16-year-old hacker known as “Da Chronic,” recalled that one of the group members coined the term ‘fishing’ to describe the act of luring a person, usually chosen from a chat room, into revealing personal information.
By January 1995, Rekouche had developed “AOHell,” a simple-to-use software program that automated the phishing process with pre-written messages and options to ‘fish’ for passwords or credit card details. It was through AOHell that Rekouche, in a 2011 journal article for Cornell University’s arXiv, first swapped fish for phish. Though he didn’t clarify the reason for the change, some believe it was inspired by the term phone phreak, coined in the 1970s to describe individuals who hacked phone lines to make free calls. (As for the origin of phreak, it’s widely believed that the ph- came from phone, while freak might have been a playful reference to free call.)
AOHell offered more than just phishing tools. For example, you could ‘mail bomb’ someone’s inbox with a flood of spam emails, use the ‘Punt’ button to log an AOL user out of their account, hit ‘Ghost’ to delete all comments except your own, or send what The Boston Globe described as ‘a graphically obscene gesture’ to everyone in a chat room. Not surprisingly, the software became a hit among teenagers, which was Rekouche’s goal all along.
“I hate the staff on AOL for one, I hate most of the people on AOL for another, and I wanted to cause a lot of chaos,” Rekouche, known as “Da Chronic,” told The Boston Globe in April 1995.
Rekouche’s time as the internet’s most notorious agent of disruption didn’t last forever—nor did AOL’s dominance as the go-to online service. However, the concept of phishing continued to evolve, and the term phishing remained just as relevant throughout its transformation.
