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Pastebin plans to police sensitive information

The owner of Pastebin is making efforts to control sensitive information on the site by hiring more staff. The site is currently a popular place for hackers to dump sensitive information.

By Vinod

28 year old owner of Pastebin, Jeroen Vader, told the BBC that Pastebin.com is planning to hire staff to actively sweep the site in order to get rid of sensitive information quickly.

The site has been the go to place for Anonymous and Lulzsec members to drop sensitive information. Many posts have revealed personal information of targets including their home email passwords, home address and sometimes even payment card details. Information is usually then publically announced on Twitter with a link the private information on Pastebin.

Currently, PasteBin receives around 1,200 abuse reports a day through email or its notification system.

"I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported," Vader said in an email interview with the BBC. "Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information."

Last December hacktivits used Pastebin to reveal personal data taken from intelligence agency Strafor.

Pastebin is said to receive an average of 17 million unique monthly visitors which has jumped up from 500,000 two years ago.

Vader says is not only used to display personal data by hacktivisst but also in testing the effectiveness of DDoS tools.

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"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," Vader said. "I do hear from people in the hackers’ community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin."

The site has been banned in countries like Turkey and Pakistan because of hacking groups like Anonymous using it to drop sensitive information. Pastebin has asked its users to avoid posting password lists or stolen information on the site.

Anonymous is not happy to hear news of Pastebin’s efforts and has recommended its followers to use a site similar to Pastebin called PasteBay.

 

Please follow this author on Twitter @Tineka_S or comment below.

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