Grimes admits to hacking indie blog Hipster Runoff a decade ago

Grimes has admitted to being the one responsible for hacking popular indie pop culture and satire blog Hipster Runoff nearly a decade ago. In 2012, the blog infamously went down, with owner and founder Carles reporting that his “server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged,” believing foul play was involved. 

Now, a decade later alt-pop star Grimes is taking responsibility for the situation. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Grimes explains her actions. “I was just at a party with my friends. Someone took this photo, and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff.” The photo in question shows Grimes kissing a friend, and was accompanied by a demeaning written article about her on Hipster Runoff which she claims got her “cancelled.” She went on to explain:

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…. OK, 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. 

“DDos” is a hacker term that stands for Distributed Denial of Service. Essentially, it involves flooding a website with more information and user traffic than it can handle, thus denying the website access to the internet. Following the hack, Hipster Runoff ceased posting on Grimes and the website was sold shortly after in 2015.

Watch Grimes look through some of her iconic photo moments, including the photo that led to the hack, for Vanity Fair below.