Pastebin isn't necessarily a website specifically for hacking groups to post huge dumps of information but it has definitely been embraced by that community. The site was intended to be a document dumping location as well as a nice place for programmers or writers to store text in order to access it later or share it. Due to all of the attention Pastebin has gotten from Anonymous and other hacking groups, the company is going to hire people to monitor its servers.
Following a recent story posted by BBC News detailing the issues Pastebin has been having with DDOS attacks as well as large volumes of traffic from posts by hacking collectives, Pastebin has decided it would be best to invest in some protection. In fact the interest in helping out Pastebin came directly from their community. Owner Jeroen Vader received a slew of offers to help police the site for free.
“Exactly how many people will be hired is not known yet. What is surprising is the amount of offers that I received in the mail since the publishing of the BBC article. It’s quite amazing how many people are willing to help out as volunteers."
Vader went on to detail that the site is seeing 17 million unique visitors a month and is getting slammed with so many DDOS attacks that they are unable to manage them. He claimed fighting the DDOS attacks was "no fun." He instead would rather focus on his goal of making a website suited for code and text files instead of massive dumps of sensitive information.
Anonymous is predictably not pleased with Vader's focus on policing sensitive information. A post from the AnonOpsSweden Twitter account recommends users switch to a clone called PasteBay,
"Owner of #Pastebin plans to hire moreStaff toHelp police"sensitive information"posted to the site.bbc.com/news/technolog… (use #pastebay)."
PasteBay claims to be uncensored and unmonitored. That reads as a lot less trustworthy than someone who is trying to run a business free of sensitive material posted by hacking collectives.
Do any of you use Pastebin for code or text files? Do you care that they are monitoring for sensitive content now? Let us know what you think of this in the comments.
