Earlier in the month, Grimes sat down for a video interview with Vanity Fair, where she was also the subject of a cover story. In the video, Grimes comments on different images from her life and career. One of them, a nightlife photo from 2012, shows Grimes kissing an unidentified friend. Present-day Grimes starts to recount how that photo went viral and made its way over to the now-defunct site Hipster Runoff, where the pseudonymous blogger Carles wrote an unflattering blog post about her. The twist? Grimes admits to — with the help of a friend in the video game industry — orchestrating a DDoS attack on Hipster Runoff, and possibly more. (DDoS stands for Distributed Denial-Of-Service, a cyber attack used to shut down a server by flooding it with traffic.)

“I actually got canceled for this,” Grimes says before launching into the story of how she blackmailed HRO into taking the photo down — effectively shutting down the site. “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.”

She continues:

“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.”

In the VF video, Grimes says the photo got “leaked” to HRO, though it was actually just reposted from the popular nightlife blog LastNightsParty.com.

A cybersecurity expert named Jackie Singh drew attention to the Grimes story yesterday. In her newsletter, Singh resurfaces a Vice interview from 2012 that talks to Carles about what happened and suggests there was a malicious hack via a Drupal vulnerability that caused damage beyond the DDoS. “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,” Carles said at the time. “My server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged.”

“I can’t really name names,” he continued. “But I know that my site is frowned down upon in the indie community. All of the other sites hate me, and many artists and labels do not support my site. I am paying a price for not being part of the Corrupt Indie Machine.”

In her newsletter, Singh notes HRO stopped targeting Grimes after the incident. She writes:

A decade later, unfazed by time and experience, Grimes remains convinced this was a triumphant moment for her, and not an ethical lapse for which she should feel ashamed. For someone who can’t stop ranting about “wokeness” and “cancellation”, Grimes doesn’t seem concerned about any actual risk associated with admitting crimes to a major magazine, despite the fact that Canada does not have a statute of limitations on cybercrime.

Hipster Runoff was sold in 2015 and has been effectively defunct since then.

https://twitter.com/derektmead/status/1506749730986274819/

https://twitter.com/bcmerchant/status/1506786220889673728/

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