Document sharing Web site Pastebin is planning to police content users post on the site to remove data dumps and other personal information more quickly and efficiently.

In an April 2 interview with the BBC, Dutch entrepreneur Jeroen Vader, who bought the Web site in early 2010, said Pastebin is looking to hire additional staff to actively monitor content and remove sensitive data. "I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported," Vader told the BBC. "Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information."

New Terms and Conditions of Use

Recently, Pastebin updated its terms and conditions of use, prohibiting users from sharing dubious information. Pastebin's policies say the Web site was "created to help programmers," noting that "Any paste or usage pattern not related to that goal which results in unusual high traffic will be flagged for investigation. Your paste may be deleted and your IP blocked. In particular, please do not paste email lists, password lists or personal information." The new terms and conditions indicate that Pastebin is looking to distance itself from the content. "If you do not comply with our Acceptable Use Policy we might ban your IP address from the Web site. Also, your IP address might be shared with authorities," Pastebin explains, as reported by The Inquirer.

Pastebin is popular among programmers and writers because it allows easy sharing of code snippets or large blocks of text. Groups like Anonymous, however, have turned the Web site into a dumping ground for posting stolen data. Recent data dumps on Pastebin include server and database configuration details from a hack on the UN, a list of databases from the adult content site YouPorn, and other such sensitive data.

Pastebin, Testing Ground for DDoS Attacks

In an interesting twist, hackers started using the Web site not just for dumping their illegally-obtained goods, but also for testing new distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. According to Vader, Pastebin sees at least one DDoS attack a day. "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," Vader told the BBC.

With additional staff dedicated to review content, Pastebin would manage to proactively find and remove objectionable data rather than just reacting to user reports, added Vader. The challenge, however, is making sure the post is actually harmful. "Reading all those items, and determining which ones are hurtful, and which ones aren't, requires a lot of time," said Vader.

(reported by Alexandra Burlacu, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)