Pastebin Upgrades Service, Adds Private Pastes (All While Being Under Attack)

Everyone’s favorite way to share thousands of pages of sensitive information (and dump PHP code that you might use later) has upgraded to what it’s calling version 3.1. This new version, in addition to some cosmetic changes, includes one major upgrade: private pastes.

The system currently supports public and “unlisted” pastes – two types excellent for anonymous sharing – but the private pastes require users to create an account with the service. Private pastes are truly private while unlisted pastes simply don’t show up in search results or on Pastebin’s popular paste list.

“These privates pastes are only visible for the users when he is logged into his account. Others are not able to view this item, even when they have a link to it. This is a new added layer of security that many users have been requesting for a while,” said Pastebin owner Jeroen Vader.

Pastebin is also currently under a fairly major DDOS attack by an unnamed botnet. Apparently nearly 20,000 unique IPs are flooding the site with traffic and the company is literally banning all botnet traffic, a virtuous if quixotic effort.

“The attack is still going on at this moment, and shows no sign of slowing down just yet,” said Vader. “Who is behind this, and what their motives are is unknown to us. It would be great if someone would speak up, but we do not expect that to happen.”