In 2012, the controversial indie blog Hipster Runoff briefly went offline due to an apparent hacking. At the time, the site’s anonymous founder and operator 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.”
A decade later, Grimes is claiming responsibility for the takedown. As she explained in a recent video interview with Vanity Fair, her motivation was Hipster Runoff’s posting of a photo of her kissing a friend at a party, accompanied by a demeaning story. “I was just at a party with my friends,” she told Vanity Fair. “Someone took this photo, and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff.”
She continued:
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.
Cybersecurity expert Jackie Singh writes on her Medium blog Hacking But Legal about how Grimes’ admission is more than just a piece of frivolous indie music gossip. Theoretically, it has potential legal ramifications.
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What does it mean to “DDoS” someone?
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. A DDoS attack works by flooding a website with more information and traffic than it can handle, thus preventing it from being able to access the internet and function—i.e., taking a website down, as Grimes described.
As explained by the Norton AntiVirus website and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a common way to initiate a DDoS is through the use of botnets, which are compromised devices that the hacker is controlling to overwhelm the targeted website. Basically, the hacker has access to tons of computers, all going to the same website until the server crashes.
Why would someone initiate a DDoS attack?
Typically, DDoS attacks are done for extortive purposes. For example, a man was arrested in 2017 (and eventually convicted) for launching a DDoS attack against Leagle.com for posting information about a criminal conviction of his. According to the Department of Justice, the man had previously tried bribing the website to remove the information. In another federal case, an Illinois man was convicted for running websites that allowed users to pay to launch DDoS attacks.
What happens if you orchestrate a DDoS attack?
DDoS attacks are illegal in the United States, per the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The attacks are deemed unlawful conduct per 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A): “Whoever—knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer…. shall be punished [with]… a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than ten years.”
In Canada, DDoS attacks fall under Section 430(1.1) of the Criminal Code. The section is called “Mischief in relation to computer data,” and it pertains to: “Everyone [who] commits mischief who wilfully destroys or alters data; renders data meaningless, useless or ineffective; obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use of data; or obstructs, interrupts or interferes with any person in the lawful use of data or denies access to data to any person who is entitled to access thereto.”
(For posterity, the Canadian government also provides a definition of “computer data”: “computer data means representations, including signs, signals or symbols, that are in a form suitable for processing in a computer system.”)
The maximum punishment for violating Section 430(1.1) of the Criminal Code is 10 years in prison.
Grimes, in 2012, was living in Montreal, Quebec. Hipster Runoff was taken down in early March 2012, per Carles’ interview with Motherboard. Section 430(1.1) of the Criminal Code was the same at the time as it is today.
What happened to Hipster Runoff?
Singh, on Hacking But Legal, has provided a good history of Hipster Runoff and the aftermath of the DDoS attack. According to Singh, Carles did not post about Grimes between April 2012 and October 2013. She notes that there was only one minor post about Grimes after the hacking occurred.
By January 2015, Carles put Hipster Runoff up for sale. At the end of the month, the site sold for $21,100, according to BrooklynVegan.
Carles has largely stayed out of the public eye since selling his website. He spoke with Motherboard again in 2015 for a retrospective called “The Last Relevant Blogger.” Also that year, he discussed the meaning of “indie” with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig in a Fader article. The @hipsterrunoff Twitter account has not sent a tweet or retweeted anything since May 2015, and the account has not liked a tweet since February 2019.
HipsterRunoff.com is still an active website, but does not have the archive of Carles’ posts. There is only a button to email trevor@hipsterrunoff.com, an address apparently belonging to Trevor McFedries, the Los Angeles–based co-founder of tech startup Brud and co-creator of the digital pop star Lil Miquela. “this seems like a bit of a reach but if by chance anyone out there scraped HipsterRunoff and has any kind of backup/record,” McFedries tweeted yesterday.
Derek Mead, who interviewed Carles about the hacking in 2012, and Brian Merchant, who wrote “The Last Relevant Blogger,” have also commented on Grimes’ admission. “It is a WILD plot twist that Grimes is now taking credit for taking down Hipster Runoff in 2012,” Mead tweeted. “What a ludicrous thing to admit in a video while talking about being canceled!”
