From cyberscoop.com
A policy change at a seemingly innocuous website could make it more difficult to stop hackers, according to information security experts who track malicious software in the wild.
Pastebin, a repository where users can post and share raw text files, said on Wednesday it has discontinued a service that charged users a $50 one-time fee to search the site for new data.
Researchers had used the scraping API to scour Pastebin for cybercriminal activity, as hackers frequently posted stolen personal data and malicious code to the site. Pastebin has a lot of legitimate activity, including posts about software tests and blocks of banal code meant for cryptographic network protocols. The malicious activity makes up a fraction of the content, and is difficult to identify without scraping capabilities because of the construction of the site.