Hackers rage as Pastebin reveals monitoring plans
The online text-file repository Pastebin, which is frequently used by the likes of Anonymous to spread instructions and dump leaked and stolen data, is to start proactively monitoring its content for illegal material.
The move was revealed by proprietor Jeroen Vader, who told the BBC on Sunday that he was "looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website's content, not just the items that are reported".
"Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information," Vader said.
The interview quickly resulted in an angry response from some of Anonymous's regular Twitter accounts. "All aboard the Censor Ship!", one account declared, shortly before tweeting a link to a Pastebin document that allegedly contained data from a NATO hack.
Another account reacted by making recommendations on how to post material to multiple Pastebin-like sites at once, to avoid "centralised pasting" and the censorship risks it carries.
Because it appears to be largely uncensored, and because it allows anonymous posting, Pastebin has for some time been the repository of choice for such material. It has been used to host not only the results of hacking operations, but also some of the instructions for perpetrating those operations.
This is not the only purpose of Pastebin — its plain-text nature makes it an ideal way for programmers to share large amounts of code — but it is the use that has brought it to wider attention in recent years.
Vader told the BBC that Pastebin already has a facility for reporting illegal material, and more than 1,000 removal requests are made each day. He said these requests are all monitored, as "trying to automatically filter out such pastes [that contain email lists and other personal information] is a pretty impossible task".
He said hiring staff to proactively monitor trending pastes would flag up popular material that might not be legal, but that also has not been complained about.
Pastebin has come under repeated attack in recent months, with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) offensives taking it offline for brief periods.
"In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn't get some kind of DDoS attack, but in February there were some really long attacks going on. The longest one went on for more than 48 hours," Vader said.
The Pastebin proprietor pointed out that no one had claimed responsibility for any of these attacks, but that he had heard that "many hackers like to test their DDoS skills on Pastebin".