Anonymous Urges Hackers to Use PasteBay as Pastebin Monitors Content

Anonymous hacking collective has urged its members to swap dumping website Pastebin for its clone PasteBay, after Pastebin's founder revealed plans to hire monitors to pull down questionable content.

In an interview with the BBC, 28-year-old Jeroen Vader, who bought the site two years ago, said the current system is inadequate to face the 1,200 abuse reports a day Pastebin receives.

"I am looking to hire some extra people soon to monitor more of the website content, not just the items reported," he told the BBC.

"Hopefully this will increase the speed in which we can remove sensitive information."

Pastebin is frequently used by hacktivists from Anonymous and LulzSec to dump hacked materials. Many posts include privacy-protected information and data such as home addresses, email passwords and credit card details.

The website attracts an average of 17 million unique visitors a month and it is blocked in Pakistan and Turkey, due to the sensitive nature of the posts.

"Exactly how many people will be hired is not known yet. What is surprising is the amount of offers that I received in the mail since the publishing of the BBC article. It's quite amazing how many people are willing to help out as volunteers," Vader said.

The website is also receiving frequent Distributed Denial of Service attacks from hackers. "In the last three months not a single day has gone by that we didn't get some kind of DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack," Vader said. "I do hear from people in the hackers' community that many hackers like to test their DDoS skills on Pastebin.

Anonymous called on all the anons to use a Pastebin clone, Pastebay, instead, which claims to be uncensored and unmonitored.

"Owner of #Pastebin plans to hire moreStaff toHelp police"sensitive information"posted to the site. bbc.com/news/technolog... (use#pastebay)," tweeted Anonymous Sweden.