Grimes Reveals She Hacked And Blackmailed Music Website Hipster Runoff In 2012
"It was my coolest hacker moment.”
Electronic musician and hopeful Mars colonist Grimes has revealed that she was behind a cyberattack that shut down the music website Hipster Runoff ten years ago.
The musician told Vanity Fair reporters that the attack came after the music website posted photos of Grimes kissing another woman at a VIP party.
While Grimes claims that the photos were taken at an event in New York then leaked to the website, the pictures also appeared online and in a coffee table book published by lastnightsparty, a now-defunct website catering to photos of celebrities partying at VIP events.
In the interview with Vanity Fair that surfaced today, Grimes said that she coordinated the hack with a friend in the videogame industry using a DDOS attack – a direct denial of service which involves the repeated pinging of a website which results in the server hardware being overwhelmed and crashing.
“We were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them. We were like, ‘We’re not going to let you put your site back up until you take the story down.’’ Grimes told Vanity Fair. “And he did, in fact, take the story down. It was my coolest hacker moment.”
The owner of Hipster Runoff says that the attack didn’t stop there. In an interview with Motherboard, the anonymous editor known as Carles detailed that the DDOS attack on the website was accompanied by the deletion of the remote server backups, erasing most of Carles’ work.
While the website eventually returned, Carles stopped posting on Hipster Runoff 2013, citing *Boredom/Other interests* according to Brooklyn Vegan.
It’s also worth noting that while DDOS attacks are super super illegal, Grimes is well beyond the statue of limitations for this particular crime.