Pastebin to speed up takedown of sensitive information

The owner of Pastebin.com, the preferred pastebin site of Anonymous-affiliated hackers, is looking to clean up the site’s image by improving detection and removal of posts containing stolen personal, financial and login information.

28 year-old Jeroen Vader bought the site in 2010 and has managed to increase its popularity since then, but part of the merit for this surge must also be attributed to Anonymous hackers’ tendency to post on the site data stolen in various attacks.

Even though the site’s Acceptable Use Policy asks users not to post email addresses, login details, stolen source code, passwords lists, personal information/data, spam links or pornographic information, there is no mechanism set up to prevent them to do so.

Posts do get taken down, but that happens only after Vader receives abuse reports (1,200 or so each day), reviews them and takes the posts down manually, so he announced his intention of hiring extra people to monitor more of the websites content and not just react to the reports.

The website is currently blocked in Pakistan and Turkey following the posting of data stolen from databases in those countries, and Vader is likely intent on preventing it getting blocked in other countries. After all, the site brings in money through banner adverts served to users.

Whether this step will make hackers ramp up their efforts to attack the site remains to be seen. According to Vader, the site has been under DDoS attacks for the last three months, and has occasionally even been downed by them.

“I do hear from people in the hackers community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin,” he commented for the BBC.