Pastebin.com downed by DDoS attack

Pastebin.com is just one among the many places where users can upload vast amounts of text on the Internet for others to see, but has lately risen in prominence due to it being the preferred pastebin of hackers operating under the AntiSec flag and many others.

So it does come as a bit of a surprise that on Tuesday it suffered a DDoS attack that downed the site for a while:

The operators of the site are yet to comment on who might be behind the attack, but it seems likely that hackers are to blame – possibly because some of their posts containing sensitive information gained through hacking have been deleted before they expected them to be? Although, the site’s use policy is very clear on what content is acceptable.

“Broadly speaking, the site was created to help programmers. Any paste or usage pattern not related to that goal which results in unusually 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 ‘report abuse’ feature can be used to flag such pastes and they will be deleted,” it says on the site’s FAQ page.

The site is currently back online and seems to work normally.

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