For quite a while now, the Pastebin website has been infamous as the place where hacker groups such as Anonymous, Lulzsec and others have not only made announcements about their various cyber attacks but actually published the results of their activities. These have often included information such as email addresses, phone numbers, passwords and credit card numbers of the websites that have been attacked by these groups.
Now the owner of Pastebin, Jeroen Vader, has said he plans to hire more staff members to help monitor and delete such messages from hacker groups. The BBC reports that Vader, who bought the site in early 2010, points out that it has a policy for its members not to post any personal information or stolen source code.
Pastebin is supposed to be used mainly by programmers who want to store some of their source code for brief periods of time but it obviously is used to post any kind of text file. The site now has 17 million unique visitors, according to Vader, but currently relies on its users to notify Pastebin of any messages that violate its policy. Vader says that the extra staff that he plans to bring in will help to find message violations before they are reported.
Even though Pastebin has become a favorite place for hacker groups to publish their messages, the site is also the victim of a number of cyber attacks. Vader states that the site has to deal with denial of service attacks every day, saying, "I do hear from people in the hackers community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin." Indeed, Vader states that his own personal information was once posted on the site, which he naturally deleted.