After every online strike by Anonymous and LulzSec — back when they did that sort of thing — it was inevitable that the leaked goods would wind up on Pastebin, the web’s vandalised bathroom stall. Now, the company wants out of the game.
The Register reports Pastebin’s Dutch owner and awesome last name possessor, 28-year-old Jeroen Vader, is tired of thousands of abuse alerts and DDoS attacks against his meek little site, which wanted only to become a place to anonymously and easily post text before it was appropriated by Sabu and co. Vader is now bringing in some cavalry, hiring an entire staff to manually purge the site of countless credit card numbers, passwords, personal addresses and the rest of Anonymous’ trove. It’ll go a long way to put Pastebin back even within the realm of a clean business, but business is sure to slump with a hacker-unfriendly policy: as The Register points out, the site “attracts an average of 17 million unique visitors a month, up from 500,000 two year ago”. Crime pays. Or at least for Vader, it used to. [The Register]