14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever a hacking takes place, especially one in which large quantities of sensitive data are obtained from a site’s databases, the cybercriminals will publish the results of their operation on Pastebin.com.
Well, as it turned out, this hackers’ heaven was taken down on Tuesday as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
“DDOS attack on Pastebin, we are working on it…” site representatives wrote on Twitter.
“Slowly getting things back under control. Sorry for the downtime & slow loading site guys, we are doing our best to stop this attack,” they tweeted an hour later.
At the time of writing, 16 hours after they learned of the hit, Pastebin is back on track, apparently functioning normally, but no other details regarding the hack are disclosed.
It’s sort of weird that hackers would launch a DDoS attack against the website that may be considered by some a cybercriminal’s best friend.
It’s true that many of the posts end up being deleted, especially if they contain sensitive information such as clear-text passwords and credit card details, but that’s just normal if they want to stay on the good side.
Pastebin.com has seen a lot of hacking operations, the latest being the one that targeted intelligence firm Stratfor, whose customers’ information wounded up all over the internet after Anonymous hackers breached their security.
Besides being a place where hackers gather to share their loot, Pastebin is also a site where programmers share code and exchange opinions.
In the past couple of weeks they’ve been working hard to make some improvements to the “paste tool,” updating the automated spam filters. They also joined the anti-SOPA protest and moved more than 60 of their online domains from GoDaddy after the company showed support for the controversial bill.