Pastebin.com arms itself against misuse

The owner of Pastebin.com plans to monitor posted content more carefully. According to a BBC article, Jeroen Vader, the 28-year-old Dutch entrepreneur who bought the platform in early 2010, is going to hire employees to watch for any sensitive information that may be posted on Pastebin.com.

Pastebin.com is used for uploading texts, mostly by developers who want to post source code, Vader says. Users are asked not to post any email or password lists, login data, personal information or pornographic material.

According to the article, Vader receives around 1,200 reports every day from the platform's abuse notification system and via email. The additional employees will ensure that undesirable content, such as personal data, is removed more quickly than before.

Pastebin.com logs about 17 million users each month. This includes people claiming to belong to Anonymous and other hacker movements, who have used the site to publish stolen data and other information. Some of that information included data from Panda Security's compromised web site, emails from security consulting firm Stratfor, and email addresses and passwords from Youporn users.

Responding to the BBC article, a Twitter account claiming to belong to the Swedish branch of Anonymous suggested hackers use the PasteBay service instead which is run by the organisation behind the PirateBay web site.

(fab)