Grimes Claims She Hacked And Blackmailed A Blog Back In The Day (Which Might Get Her In Trouble Today)
Grimes isn’t just an experimental cyberpop artist-turned-billionaire’s kids’ mother. According to Grimes herself, she’s also a skilled hacker who once brought down the popular blog Hipster Runoff. And that’s cool if you’re trying to impress Angelina Jolie and her sassy little haircut in Hackers. But if you’re someone who follows along with something like, oh, I don’t know, the law, then admitting you hacked and blackmailed a blog might not be the coolest thing to admit during a Vanity Fair YouTube video. Which is…exactly what Grimes did.
Grimes sat down with Vanity Fair to break down 10 moments from her life, and one of those moments was a picture of her kissing a friend at a party in 2012. Grimes says the picture was leaked and made its way to a post on Hipster Runoff. Grimes says that the post happened in the “pre-woke era” and it got her “cancelled,” which tells me someone needs to get Grimes in possession of a dictionary so that she can look up what the word “cancelled” means. But she claims that Hipster Runoff described the situation as “Grimes gone wild,” and that it wasn’t the kind of internet infamy she was looking for, considering she was just starting her career as a manic pixie indie music star. So Grimes did what any normal person would do. Sorry, scratch that – what Grimes did was call up a tech friend who hacked Hipster Runoff until the anonymous owner, Carles, agreed to remove the picture and post. via Pitchfork:
“And then he [Carles], like, ran this story, and this was, like, I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like, start my career. And it was, like, Grimes gone wild or something. And it was just this, like, super wack, like, mean story. And it was, like, this meme that was going all over the internet.
But my friend who worked for – I will not say which video game – had access to…okay, well I don’t wanna get him in trouble, but, anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them. We were like, like, we’re not gonna let you run your – put your site back up until you take the story down. And he did, in fact, take the story down. And it was like my coolest hacker moment. So, yeah, that’s the story of this photo.”
A DDoS attack is essentially an act where too much information and traffic is flooded to a site, in effect, crashing the whole thing. Hipster Runoff was mysteriously down for some time in 2012. At the time, Carles commented on the situation, saying that it appeared they’d been hacked n’ crashed, because their hosting and support team noticed some “suspicious” activity before the site crashed, like remote disks being “sabotaged.” Hipster Runoff operated online from 2007 to 2013, and the website was sold in 2015.
So here’s where it gets murky, legal-wise. Pitchfork spoke to a cybersecurity expert, who explained that DDoS attacks are illegal in the United States. But what if Grimes, a Canadian person, was operating in Canada at the time? And she might very well have been, as Grimes was living in Montreal, Quebec in 2012. Well, DDoS attacks are illegal in Canada too (except they’re categorized as “mischief in relation to computer data“). But, it’s not known if any legal action will be taken against Grimes or her anonymous accomplice.
Grimes has likely put that hacker lifestyle behind her. No more DDoS’ing websites for Grimes! Because really, Grimes doesn’t have to slum it with 1s and 0s code anymore to get her way. All she has to do is message Elon Musk, and see if he’ll hop on Twitter and do what he does best, which is to annoy the ever-loving shit out of someone until they give in.
Pic: YouTube