Pastebin to Get Unpopular New Feature: Censorship

pastebin.com, the site popular with programmers wanting to share programming code – and hackers who like to share exploits and sensitive information, is to be censored.

Pastebin is often used by the likes of Anonymous and related groups such as Antisec and Lulzsec to post sensitive information such as home addresses, email passwords and bank account details. Even internet feeds from Trendnet home security cameras could be got at by strangers to spy on the owners.

The site was bought from the original owner in 2010 by 28 year old Dutch entrepreneur Darth Jeroen Vader and has since grown in popularity, averaging 17 million unique visitors a month and makes money from banner adverts. He now wants to put a stop to all this abuse and has claimed that he will hire staff to remove “sensitive” information from the site, even before a complaint is made, of which there are currently 1200 a day being made. “I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported,” he told the BBC. “Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information.”

Finally, Pastebin is also a victim of unidentified hackers, “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 said. “I do hear from people in the hackers community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin.” No doubt there will be a lot more of this once he starts his censorship in ernest, as these aren’t the kind of people who just accept something like this and go away quietly into the night.