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Much to the disappointment of the cybersecurity community, Pastebin has two features that will make it harder to combat malicious code on the site.
The popular site Pastebin, where users can exchange small snippets of text, has two new features that, according to information security specialists, will be very much to the liking of malware operators.
The first function was called "Burn After Read" ("After reading, burn"). With its help, site users can create fragments of text that will be automatically deleted after the first reading. The second feature, Password Protected Pastes, allows you to protect published snippets of text with a password.
The above features are nothing new and have been used on other similar sites for a long time. However, Pastebin, which ranks in the Alexa Top 2000 most popular sites on the Internet, did not have them before.
Although the site is used by legitimate developers to exchange code samples, for many years Pastebin has also been very popular with malware creators who use it to store malicious commands, stolen data, IP addresses of C&C servers to manage malware, etc. Pastebin has over the past decade became the de facto hosting for malicious code.
To combat malware operators using Pastebin, cybersecurity companies have been creating special tools for several years to check new published fragments for malicious content or sensitive data. If the desired content is identified, the malicious fragments are indexed in special private databases, which are then used to respond to incidents. In addition, such fragments are reported to the Pastebin administration for subsequent removal.
However, with the advent of the functions "Burn After Read" and "Password Protected Pastes" it will be more difficult for information security specialists to deal with malicious content. Now it will become much more difficult to find out in real time whether malicious code has been uploaded to the site. In addition, it will make it more difficult to respond to incidents after infection.
It is not known what the Pastebin administration thinks about the opinion of information security experts. However, according to her, new functions have been implemented on the site due to numerous requests from users.
The popular site Pastebin, where users can exchange small snippets of text, has two new features that, according to information security specialists, will be very much to the liking of malware operators.
The first function was called "Burn After Read" ("After reading, burn"). With its help, site users can create fragments of text that will be automatically deleted after the first reading. The second feature, Password Protected Pastes, allows you to protect published snippets of text with a password.
The above features are nothing new and have been used on other similar sites for a long time. However, Pastebin, which ranks in the Alexa Top 2000 most popular sites on the Internet, did not have them before.
Although the site is used by legitimate developers to exchange code samples, for many years Pastebin has also been very popular with malware creators who use it to store malicious commands, stolen data, IP addresses of C&C servers to manage malware, etc. Pastebin has over the past decade became the de facto hosting for malicious code.
To combat malware operators using Pastebin, cybersecurity companies have been creating special tools for several years to check new published fragments for malicious content or sensitive data. If the desired content is identified, the malicious fragments are indexed in special private databases, which are then used to respond to incidents. In addition, such fragments are reported to the Pastebin administration for subsequent removal.
However, with the advent of the functions "Burn After Read" and "Password Protected Pastes" it will be more difficult for information security specialists to deal with malicious content. Now it will become much more difficult to find out in real time whether malicious code has been uploaded to the site. In addition, it will make it more difficult to respond to incidents after infection.
It is not known what the Pastebin administration thinks about the opinion of information security experts. However, according to her, new functions have been implemented on the site due to numerous requests from users.