In a recent video interview with Vanity Fair, Grimes casually admitted to hacking and blackmailing the satirical mid-2000s blog Hipster Runoff for running a “mean story” about her. In 2012, the blog obtained a photo of Grimes kissing a friend that the singer claimed was presented as “Grimes gone wild.” With the help of a friend who she said worked for a video game company, Grimes said, “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.” A Distributed Denial of Service attack inundates a site with so much traffic that it usually crashes. Such attacks are also illegal. The blog’s anonymous founder told Motherboard at the time of the attack that he suspected foul play. Grimes claimed Hipster Runoff succumbed to the hack-mailing and took the picture down.
