Pop singer Claire "Grimes" Boucher admitted to hacking, DDOSing and taking down Hipster Runoff, a popular early-2010s site which had posted a photograph of her at a party, and "basically blackmailing" the site's operators. The photo had already been published elsewhere; the site never recovered from the attack.
Grimes claims in the interview that a friend, who worked for a video game company, helped her issue a DDOS attack against Hipster Runoff (a method for overwhelming a website's servers with fake traffic until it stops working) and "basically blackmail them," she said. "We were like, we're not gonna let you 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."
Whether or not the photos were actually "leaked," as she claims, is unclear; infosec professional Jackie Singh wrote in a blog post about her recent admission that the photos may have first appeared on a NYC photographer's popular party-pictures website (which published an accompanying glossy photo book).
I didn't think anything would top Vladimir Putin complaining about being "cancelled" and yet here we are! Samantha Cole writes:
she's well beyond the statute of limitations. She's comfortable talking about it now because she wasn't "canceled" for anything; she's sitting in front of a camera talking to one of the biggest culture magazines in the U.S., which broadcast the photo again in this video interview
