These days , phishing approach can chance you anywhere from your Gmail account to your school text message inbox . But back when the wordphishingwas coined , they were specific to a individual place : AOL .
It all set out in 1994 , when a group of enterprising drudge from across the U.S. began impersonate AOL representatives in secret chats , pull the wool over someone’s eyes unsuspecting AOL users into surrendering their login credentials and credit card information . The hacker were mainly just interested in stealing the data so they could use AOL through other people ’s accounts , rather than having to compensate for their own . According to Koceilah Rekouche , then a 16 - year - old hacker known as “ Da Chronic , ” someone in their party ably nicknamed this process of baiting a somebody — usually selected from a kitty of user in a confab room — into turning over personal details “ fishing . ”
By January 1995 , Rekouche had created “ AOHell , ” a novice - friendly package program that automated the cognitive operation with boilerplate content and pick to “ fish ” for passwords or credit wag figure . It was in AOHell that Rekouche , as he wrote in a2011 journal article for Cornell University ’s arXiv , first changedfishtophish . Though he did n’t provide an explanation for the switch , some believe it was inspiredby the termphone phreak , which was mint in the 1970s to describe people who hacked headphone line to make free call . ( As for wherephreakcame from , it ’s mostly assumed that theph - was borrowed fromphone , andfreakmay have been a shimmer onfree call . )
“ I detest the staff on AOL for one , I hate most of the people on AOL for another , and I wanted to induce a lot of chaos , ” Rekouche as “ Da Chronic ” toldThe Boston Globein April 1995 .
Rekouche ’s stint as the internet ’s most brawny agent of bedlam did n’t last incessantly — nor did AOL ’s eminence as the online service of selection . But the concept of phishingcontinued to grow and mutate , and the termphishingpersevered right along with it .
