History of AOL Warez

I was recently cleaning out some boxes of lost hardware. I kind of hoped I would find an old zip disk that had a copy of the 3D model file for the Titanic movie. Someone from the studio made it available. I think it was a lightwave 3d file and at the time had to download a copy of that just to view it.

I was getting super nostalgic reading it, but when I started scrolling through these screenshots... my god, the memories just came flooding back. They all have a distinctly "warez" look, even though they are wildly different from one another.

Macfilez, zelifcam, spending hours busting into rooms and convincing mass mail bots to send you email and downloading 3D studio max, maya, photoshop (100s of mb) in 1.4 mb mass mail chunks, building programs in OneClick on your Mac to write l33t text and bust into rooms, the AOL keyword “green”... those were the glory days.

It made no sense, it was amazing.

AOL actually incorporated features that these AOHell programs invented such as the “Buddy List”. Before the buddy list, one had to manually check to see if a particular person was logged in. Someone came up with the idea of automating the process and displaying a list of who was logged into AOL. Seems like a simple idea but sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious.

Everyone ultimately grew out of the actual AOL platform but still congregated on Efnet. Lessons learned from those days are still relevant today. For example, when people back then started to learn about *nix systems, one of the first things you HAD to learn was how to filter out ping floods. Then the smurf attack came along and to protect an irc channel from a takeover, one had to build a large and robust eggdrop botnet to maintain control of the channel. Then people started hacking the boxes that the eggdrops were hosted on and telling the bot to give the attacker operator status. To counter that then people incorporated +o/-b <hash> as a way to verify to the other bots that the person getting ops was legitimate.

The IRC servers had to also keep up because people would DoS the servers to force net splits. A net split occurred when the irc server disconnected from the network and the attacker would trick the server into thinking it was a real operator. To do that, the attacker would part and then join the empty channel, since it was disconnected from the rest of the IRC network, to gets ops so when the server rejoined the network they would be given ops since there was no timestamp on who was the real op.

For historical sake, some nicks from that I recall from the AOL scene were – GaL, Paladin, motel6, ttol, Code, UsNavy999, Panda, EViL`, amos, optima, proggie, shiver, BoNe, Chong, WiCKeD, low, Playa, Majin, mijit, bionic, trips

I am happy I never did anything too stupid but from a CS perspective I learned a lot very quickly.

Ah, good times.

Now as a technical adult I’m very curious how they could do it. Did they send a certain “magic” byte sequence to my username? Did they overload it somehow? I can still vividly recall an IM with a stream of sinister ASCII and suddenly poof! Offline!

Would love it if someone would put together a doc like this about the BBS ANSI art scene - groups like iCE, ACiD, RELiC, etc. That was some amazing stuff, and a great community.

This brings back tons of memories. Including the first time I infected a computer with a virus and lost everything. Lesson learned.

* CC generators actually worked to create an account that would last a good amount of time

* In the early days (~ AOL v2.5) they had a CGI form you could fill out and have a disc sent to your home. So of course we scripted it and had hundreds of free formattable 3.5"'s. A bit down the road and MS had a similar thing for Windows '95 replacement discs -- they'd send you the entire set if one was bad, which was a lot of good discs :)

* AOL at one point allowed ordering physical products (early digital cameras and the like) via your account credit. Mix in a phished account and you can see how that goes.

* I can't remember the names right now, but there were services in which you could pick up a CD and get free dial-up email access. The gig is they would show you ads. Patch the EXE and viola, you essentially just have a PPP account to the web.

Ahh, good times...

Those were the days, man.

  /ctcp username ping +++ATH0

(Forgive me if I've gotten the syntax wrong, it's been a long time.)

Fun fact: Da Chronic is a cool dude (shout out #pain) and also wrote this fun thing about phishing:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.4692

I also got started in programming during the "AOL Prog" era. Good times.

Looks like I'm in good company.

Of course, I was running Linux on a UMSDOS partition by the time I found out about it. :(

Anyone have a list of the old q codes?

i was unpuntable on aol (still am!) and will never give away my secret! ;)

http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/

I remember when Napster came around; that was the beginning of the end of “anything goes” on a university residential network.

There were at least a dozen well known ones used for different purposes.

Some of them were for tormenting people by sending automated IMs, some were for flooding mailboxes and some were for "phishing" but they were terrible; all they would do is open an IM to a random member and dump in a preset block of text that tried to convince them to hand over their password, and the scripts were bad. They were obviously written by young teenagers.

These tools often had a small user interface that floated over the AOL window. They had panels that would slide out to perform various functions.

The most popular tool for a while was Super Mad Cow.

Super Mad Cow was a swiss army knife of AOL tools in one application.

Here are some of the functions it had that I remember:

* Phisher - You could set up macros that would randomly choose and IM accounts with preset blocks of text to try to social engineer people to give you their password or create a subaccount for them.

* Forwarder - The application would open your mailbox, index all of your mail and then present an interface with checkboxes that you could multi-select to mass forward mail.

* Lister Bot - In order for this to work you have to know that AOL had no limit on the size of your email inbox, so you could have gigabytes of data stored in your own inbox.

This function would take a CD image, large zip or rar file, split it into small chunks of a few megabytes, attach each chunk to an email to yourself and tag the subject of each email with a serial number so lister clients could identify all the chunks for that file, download them and re-assemble them. This way you could have dozens of CD images, floppy images and other archives in your inbox that you could trade with other "couriers" (people who traded warez).

The lister bot would automatically scan your inbox and make a list of all the packages you had, including packages that had been forwarded to you by other bots, then it would create an email with an index that you could forward to other screen names.

The lister bot also had a chat bot function where you could enter a chat room and it would announce itself, and if someone typed a special keyword the bot would email them the list of your warez. The bot would also announce a specific list of hot items you had and chat participants could request those items straight away. Then that person could type a special keyword followed by the serial number of the package they wanted and your list server bot would automatically forward all the parts of that package from your inbox to the requesting screen name.

The requested packages would arrive in the recipient's inbox and could be downloaded instantly, because you were just forwarding emails -- the way AOL forwarded emails inside their own system is they would just copy the files directly into your mailbox via their own filesystem, so there was virtually zero wait time.

* Hidden keyword menu - AOL employees occasionally created silly content that could be accessed using unlisted keywords (the infamous cop eating a donut keyword comes to mind). The authors of Super Mad Cow would update the known hidden keywords with each new version and present a menu of them for easy access.

* Mailbox manager - The mailbox manager would create a personal index of all the packages in your inbox and let you perform maintenance tasks on them at the package level, such as deleting and forwarding, without having to work with the individual emails that had chunks of the packages in them. It would also read emails from your other subaccounts with commands to forward packages to them, then it would delete the main copy so you could manage different kinds of packages using different subaccounts. For example you could have one subaccount for trading ebooks, one for music, one for games and one for porn.

* List parser - The list parser would enter known warez chat rooms and watch for the LIST keyword. This was a keyword used by lister bots that indicated they were about to either dump a list of warez or offer to forward their list. The list parser would either read the list from the chat room and present a list of packages you could request with checkboxes and then automatically request all the necessary parts of the package for you, or it would request an email with the package list, open your inbox, parse the list and then do the same. Later on, list parsers gained the ability to scan your inbox to see if you already had some chunks of a package and only request the missing chunks.