numbers. This software ultimately released 3 versions and helped to create thousands of fake accounts before AOL weakened its ability through more expedient account verification. Phishing tools. The program included a "fisher" tool in 1995 that enabled hackers to steal passwords and credit card information through automated social engineering. The program would barrage random AOL users with instant messages like: A punter (IM-bomber), which would send malicious Instant Message(s) to another user that would sign 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 into the program.) An IM manager, which provided facilities to automatically respond to or block IMs from certain users. A Steve Case cloak, which allowed users to pose as AOL founder Steve Case in chat rooms. Motives and legacy The existence of AOHell and similar software even allowed AOL to develop its own warez community. Lurking in secret chat rooms with names such as 'AirZeraw', mm, cerver, 'wArEzXXX', g00dz, 'punter', 'gif', 'coldice', 'GRiP', and 'trade', AOHell created bots, often referred to as 'servers', which would send out a list of warez (illegally copied 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 one's mailbox. Since the data merely had to be copied into another user's mailbox (while still residing on an AOL server), the piracy was only limited by how fast messages could be forwarded, with AOL paying for all the cost of the bandwidth. One additional limitation included an allotted number of email messages which could be sent per day by a particular user account. Botters were able to circumvent this limitation by signing up for a white-list account which was subjected to an unknown probationary period where AOL administrators monitored the account. The existence of software like AOHell provided a 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