Pastebin may be deleting Anonymous data

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Pastebin, the website members of Anonymous have used to post?information they have hacked -- including government and company employee emails, passwords, and sometimes phone numbers and addresses of those in law enforcement -- says it's hiring extra staffers to monitor and remove "sensitive information" that violates the file-hosting site's policies.

The site, where large text files and source code can be "pasted" and easily shared, has an "acceptable use policy" that states: "Please do not paste email lists, password lists or personal information.?The 'report abuse' feature can be used to flag such pastes and they will be deleted."

Still, hacking group Anonymous has used Pastebin for more than a year to share data it has taken from groups ranging from Arizona law enforcement to Universal Music and Viacom. Now Pastebin's owner, ?Jeroen Vader of the Netherlands, says?he's going to step up monitoring and removal of such postings by adding more staff to plow through Pastebin's postings by the site's 200,000 members.

In an email interview with the BBC, Vader said he is "looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website's content, not just the items that are reported" as abuse:

Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information. This will give us more time to look at trending items in detail if they haven't been reported yet. Often articles contain a lot of information, and part of that can be a person's details. This does not mean straight away that it should be removed. Reading all those items, and determining which ones are hurtful, and which ones aren't, requires a lot of time. That's why we rely on the abuse report system at the moment. But there are plans to improve on this.

Vader also said there have been "a few cases when authorities request IP information from Pastebin, and we tend to comply with such requests, but only with a valid court order of course."

In one of its questions, the BBC said that despite Pastebin's guidelines about posting emails, stolen source code or password lists, "people associated with Anonymous often do this -- and at times you have flagged up their actions on your own Twitter account -- for example the YouPorn attack you tweeted about on 23 Feb. Do you accept that the popularity of such posts help drive traffic to the site and ultimately generates you advertising revenue?"

Said Vader: "We do indeed not allow people to post email lists and other personal information that does not belong to them. That said, we are very much aware that it happens a lot, but trying to automatically filter out such pastes is a pretty impossible task," which is where extra staffing will be helpful.

Anonymous tweeted its anger over the news. And while Pastebin is one of the better-known file-hosting sites, it's certainly not the only one.?The hacking group won't have to look too far or too long to find another.

-- Via The Register

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