Pastebin.com has become a popular place for stolen data as well as boasts from hackers associated with Anonymous and other groups. The site’s status as a home for hackers may soon be in jeopardy however.
In an interview with BBC, Pastebin owner Jeroen Vader stated that the site is looking to hire additional people to monitor the website’s content.
“Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information,” Vader was quoted as saying.
According to Vader, he receives an average of 1,200 abuse reports a day via Pastebin’s on-site notification system as well as by email. Due to hacked material being published, the site has been blocked in Pakistan and Turkey. Users in both countries continue to find ways to visit the site however, and traffic from the two nations has only fallen by 50 percent, he said.
Pastebin did not respond to an inquiry from SecurityWeek before publication. Though the site asks users not to post email lists, login details, password lists and other information, in the past year it has been used more than once to do exactly that. For example, when security think tank Stratfor was hacked, details were posted to Pastebin that included credit card numbers, email addresses and encrypted passwords. In addition, hackers were also discovered in January to have posted source code stolen from Symantec on Pastebin as well.
On its website, Pastebin states that anyone who does not comply with its acceptable use policy risks having their IP address banned from the website and shared with authorities. According to Vader, Pastebin itself has been the target of unidentified hackers during the past few months as well.
“In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn’t get some kind of DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack,” he told BBC. “I do hear from people in the hackers (sic) community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin.”