Anonymous Favorite Pastebin.com Hit By DoS

Pastebin.com, a site used by hacker collective Anonymous to announce their web site break-ins, was downed Tuesday by a denial of service attack.

The site, which lets people post large amounts of text anonymously for public viewing, was inaccessible for less than a half hour before slowly returning. "Sorry for the downtime and slow loading site guys, we are doing our best to stop this attack," Pastebin.com said on the microblogging site Twitter.

The DoS occurred roughly a week and a half after Anonymous announced on Pastebin.com that it hacked the web site of security think tank Strategic Forecast, commonly known as Stratfor. Anonymous claimed to have stolen more than 17,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses, as well as 2.7 million e-mails. Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman confirmed that a hack had occurred and personal data of site users was stolen. He did not provide details, saying the break-in was under investigation by law enforcement.

Pastebin.com did not give a reason for the DoS attack, so it's not known whether there's any connection to Anonymous' mischief. The organization uses Pastebin.com to announce its latest hacks and to post other activities.

Pastebin.com is a kind of Internet clipboard that anyone can use to post large amounts of text. Such sites are used by developers to share code, while others like to take advantage of the option of posting text anonymously.

Anonymous claimed the Strafor hack was part of a week-long campaign to wreak "havoc on global systems, militaries and governments."

The organization chooses targets based on political sympathies, instead of profit. It has taken credit for many hacks, including some retaliatory attacks on companies the group deemed as enemies of whistleblowing site WikiLeaks. In August, Anonymous took credit for defacing the Syrian Ministry of Defense web site in retaliation for the government crackdown on protesters.