14 DAY TRIAL // The Hurley Medical Center in the city of Flint, Michigan, reported a cyberattack one day after an ominous video had been posted online by the Anonymous hacker collective.
The clip, posted last Wednesday, on January 20, announced a new Anonymous campaign, #OpFlint, aimed at bringing more media attention to the dire situation of Flint residents.
If you haven't been paying attention to US news, the city of Flint faced a state of emergency after lead was found in the city's water supply.
The Flint water poisoning scandal
For the past two years, city and state officials have been supplying sub-standard water to the city's residents, filled with lead, a powerful neurotoxin.
The decision was made because officials wanted to cut down on local expenses and decided to use water from the local (polluted) Flint River, instead of Lake Huron, the water source that supplies Detroit.
As it turned out, this new water supply wasn't up to par with health standards, and people started getting sick. In spite of all these details, the national media and other more high-ranking officials only found out about this in 2015, when President Obama declared a national state of emergency for the Flint area.
The city of Flint switched back to its original water source, but now, everybody wants the officials that made this decision to pay, and especially Governor Snyder.
Anonymous joins Flint's justice crusade
Besides local protests and militias formed by Flint residents, Anonymous joined this campaign last week, promising to use its cyber powers to bring more details to light.
According to local Michigan news site MLive, one day later after Anonymous announced its intentions via an online video, Hurley Medical Center's IT staff were reporting on a cyber-attack that triggered some alerts of virus infections on their systems.
Officials said no patient data was stolen and didn't name anyone as their main suspects.
The fact that Anonymous had posted a threatening video the day before may have been a coincidence. Or not. You be the judge. Knowing Anonymous, they wouldn't probably be interested in patient data to begin with.
We'll find out in the following days if they were behind the attack, when (and if) hospital staff emails or administrative files mysteriously appear online to show evidence of some state-orchestrated cover-up involving the medical records of Flint residents. Or not.
Below is Anonymous' video regarding #OpFlint.
UPDATE: The article was updated because we misquoted the source and made it look like Anonymous was 100% behind the attack. The story was supposed to highlight the coincidence between the video's release and the virus detection the very next day.
