Pastebin no longer safe haven for Hackers

The folks at the favorite info-dumping site of groups such as what once was LulzSec and the still very active Anonymous have announced they'll be cutting back on so-called "sensitive" posts. Pastebin has been a fabulous place for those with no wish to be tracked to their source to post information that could lead to law-breaking activities. That's not what the site was originally made for, but what it's become rather famous for over the past few months and years. The current owner, Jeroen Vader, has pledged to cut down on the amount of uses of the site which constitute "abuse" as set by their own rules.

This means that if he does indeed find help to do so, Vader will be cracking down on the amount of time that posts with illicit content. This illicit content currently ranges from stolen source codes from closed-source applications, lists of emails and contact information of those who do not know it's being shared, and rally calls to illegal action. As Vader notes, he doesn't want this cutdown to affect those using the site for non-illegal matters:

"I think it is very important that people have access to sites like Pastebin, because it offers them total freedom of speech. ... I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported. Hopefully this will increase the speed which we can remove sensitive information." – Vader

Pastebin has been blocked by several countries due to its relatively complete lack of censorship, and is, believe it or not, not loved by all citizens of the web. In fact, Pastebin is the target of hackers wishing to break the site down with DDOS attacks quite constantly.

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

Living in a world where hacking skills are held in high regard and providing a tool that can very well help those with those skills execute plans can be a tough cookie to crack. Vader remains confident that traffic and the usefulness of the site will remain high through this new round of control over its contents.

BONUS: Check out [Pastebin search results] to see how many times we've referred to the site in our entire history as news site!

[via BBC]