Grimes claims her “coolest hacker moment” was helping shut down Hipster Runoff

Grimes has claimed that she orchestrated a cyberattack on the influential blog, Hipster Runoff, that caused it to temporarily shut down in 2012.

The musician has alleged that she enlisted the help of her hacker friend to issue a DDoS attack against the blog. This is a method for overwhelming a site’s servers with fake traffic until it breaks.

Hipster Runoff, a blog run its anonymous founder and operator Carles, ran from 2007-2013 and was known for its controversial commentary on indie artists and more.

Grimes‘ motivation for the apparent hack was in retaliation to Hipster Runoff posting a photo of her kissing a friend at a party, which was accompanied by what she called a “mean” story.

“I was just at a party with my friends,” she reflected about the incident to Vanity Fair. “Someone took this photo, and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff,” she said.

“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. So, yeah, that’s the story of this photo.”

At the time of the 2012 attack, Carles told Motherboard: “My hosting company and support team say that there are signs of foul play on the server, and some of the last actions before it crashed are very suspicious.” He added: “My server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged.”

In Canada where Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) is from and where it’s believed she helped launched the hack, DDoS falls under Section 430(1.1) of the Criminal Code, meaning she could face a criminal charge if her admission proves true. The maximum punishment is 10 years in prison.

Meanwhile, in other Grimes news, the artist has shared details of her forthcoming EP and double album, ‘Book 1’ and ‘Book 2’.