Pastebin Under Massive Cyber Attack , More Than 20K IP Address Blocked To Prevent DDoS Attack
Pastebin - most widely used & world's number one paste tool yet again faced massive cyber attack. According to pastebin official twitter profile the 1st attack came on the 18th February where the attacker was using a botnet to send millions of requests to pastebin servers in an attempt to flood the network, inshort the attacker was trying to engage a DDoS attack. In response the pastebin team immediately took action while blocking more than 4000 IP address, but it was later found that those counter measure seems useless in-front of the attack so again more than 9000 IP address get blocked. According to the last twitter update pastebin confirmed that they are still adding more IP to the block list and now the number of block listed IP became more than 20000. This attack came on the day when Pastebin’s developers revealed the fact that the 3.1 version has gone online.
In the press release Pastebin team said:-
"For the last 16 hours Pastebin.com has been under attack by a botnet. Someone is using this botnet to send millions of requests to our servers in an attempt to flood the network to the point where it becomes inaccessible. A botnet is a collection of compromised computers connected to the Internet (each compromised computer is known as a 'bot').
So far we have been able to block about 20,000 IP's, but this number is growing by the minute. These IP's are most likely from innocent people who have no clue that their computer is being used for this purpose. It is highly recommended that you always have up-to-date antivirus software installed, and a good Firewall active.
Later today we will publish the list of IP's from today's 'botnet attack' on another server so you are able to check if your own computer has been compromised.
If your IP is in this list, you will not be able to access Pastebin at this time. With the current IPv4 system there are a total number of 4,294,967,296 IP's. The chance that your IP is blocked is rather small.
We sincerely apologize for the times that we were unable to block the attacks, and we will continue to fight these attacks as well as we can to make sure Pastebin is available 24/7."
So far we have been able to block about 20,000 IP's, but this number is growing by the minute. These IP's are most likely from innocent people who have no clue that their computer is being used for this purpose. It is highly recommended that you always have up-to-date antivirus software installed, and a good Firewall active.
Later today we will publish the list of IP's from today's 'botnet attack' on another server so you are able to check if your own computer has been compromised.
If your IP is in this list, you will not be able to access Pastebin at this time. With the current IPv4 system there are a total number of 4,294,967,296 IP's. The chance that your IP is blocked is rather small.
We sincerely apologize for the times that we were unable to block the attacks, and we will continue to fight these attacks as well as we can to make sure Pastebin is available 24/7."