It’s hard being a hacker’s darling. Pastebin is a dox dumping site – as well as a useful tool for programmers and writers who want to share a piece of text or store it for later – and it is facing what could be a termed a problem of popularity. Because groups like Anonymous have used the service to dump sensitive information, the company has been banned in Turkey and Pakistan and, more important, has become the target of DDOS attacks by kiddies who want to test their exciting new scripts. The result? A company that is, by all metrics, growing, now needs to spend money and solicit volunteers to protect itself from its biggest fans.
After a BBC story noted Pastebin’s problems, the site’s owner, Jeroen Vader, received a number of offers to help police the site for free. The monitors will pull down questionable content when users report seeing it using the site’s interface.
“Exactly how many people will be hired is not known yet. What is surprising is the amount of offers that I received in the mail since the publishing of the BBC article. It’s quite amazing how many people are willing to help out as volunteers,” he said.
He said Pastebin is seeing 17 million unique visitors per month and that he’s getting more DDOS attacks than he currently can handle. “Fighting these certainly is no fun,” he said. His goal is to create a space that is used more for code and text sharing than information dumps.
Anonymous isn’t happy with this move, recommending its minions use a Pastebin clone, PasteBay, instead. PasteBay claims to be uncensored and unmonitored, something that I’m less inclined to trust than a dude who is just trying to run a legal business by working within the confines of international law.