Pastebin: How a popular code-sharing site became a hacker hangout(thenextweb.com)

    Earlier this year Pastebin was under heavy attack by a hacker.
    This person was creating about 500 new pastes per second, all
    which were very much alike. Each item contained an email
    address and a message saying that I had to contact that email
    address if I wanted this attack to stop.

    The requests came from thousands of different IP’s, but I
    managed to stop it for a few minutes until the hacker came up
    with another type of attack. Eventually I contacted the person
    in question. He replied that he was very impressed with my
    infrastructure, and that he wanted to know on what kind of
    hardware and software I was running.

    He was a big fan of Pastebin, and simply wanted to test the
    infrastructure. Of course I was fuming with anger at the time
    of the attack. Funnily enough, over time we got to know each
    other, and since then he has helped me guard off various other
    attacks.