Jeroen Vader, the owner of the website Pastebin.com has announced that he plans to hire extra staff that will monitor the content that is put on the website. The sole purpose of the new employees will be to scout around the website and reduce the amount of time that stolen data remains on the website.
During recent times, Pastebin.com has become a favoured website with hacktivist groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous who dump large amounts of stolen data and leave it there for all to see.
Vader has revealed that since he has become the owner of the website in 2010, the popularity has increased and it now attracts on average 17 million visitors a month. With the website attracting so many people, the monitoring system that is in place to flag up any inappropriate data is struggling to keep up. At the moment, Vader is relying on an abuse report system to flag up any inappropriate data but it has now reached the stage where the system isn’t responsive enough. On average, PasteBin currently receives 1,200 abuse reports a day and therefore the need for extra staff to monitor the content on the website is becoming more important.
Vader stated, “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 in which we can remove sensitive information.”
Members of the website are asked not to post personal or stolen pieces of information but this does not deter members of the hacktivist groups. The website is also used by hacktivists to test the effectiveness of distributed denial- of- service attack (DDoS) tools. The aim of these tools is to make a computer or network resource unavailable to the intended user(s).
Vader commented, “In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn’t get some kind of DDoS attack. I do hear from people in the hackers’ community that many hackers like to test their DDOS skills on Pastebin.”
Once the new employees are in place, it will be interesting to see whether the hacktivist groups continue to dump stolen data on this website if the length of time that it remains on the site is reduced.
