Paul Egan

Detroit Free Press Lansing Bureau

LANSING -- The State of Michigan has stepped up its cyber security alert level, and the Michigan State Police are investigating after the activist hacker group Anonymous launched a Flint operation and called for Gov. Rick Snyder to be charged with "voluntary or involuntary manslaughter," according to postings on the Internet and social media.

A video purportedly from Anonymous was posted Wednesday on the website of IntelGroup, which is described as a faction that supports Anonymous.

The group is known for cyber attacks on government and corporate websites.

"For over a year now, the citizens of Flint, Mich., have been subjected to drinking tap water filled with lead and other poisons," the video says.

"The crimes committed by Gov. Snyder as well as other city officials will not go unpunished."

The video and related text posting tell Flint residents the group will "amplify your voice where the mainstream media will sorely fail you, as it has in the past."

Caleb Buhs, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget, which oversees state computer systems, said the department's cyber security teams are on alert for "activity outside of the normal parameters and are in contact with our private vendor partners and MSP to ensure we are prepared in case of an attack attempt."

Buhs said the state website was briefly knocked offline last weekend by a denial of service attack, though he couldn't say whether it was related to the posted threat.

"The attempt caused slower performance and a brief period where the site was offline," he said. "Working with our private partners we were able to mitigate the problem in a short amount of time and have not incurred any further attacks since this past weekend's events."

The state is constantly subjected to cyber attacks of varying degrees of severity. Buhs said he can only recall one other incident in the last 18 months in which the state website was knocked offline, and that was for a similar duration of less than an hour.

The MSP cyber section, already investigating the Saturday attack, is "aware of the video and is actively monitoring the situation," said spokeswoman Tiffany Brown.



In Snyder's Lansing, information flows slowly

Flint's drinking water became contaminated with lead in April 2014 while the city was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. The state Department of Environmental Quality has admitted a mistake in failing to require corrosion control chemicals to be added when the city switched its source of water to the Flint River.

Snyder said in his State of the State address Tuesday he accepts responsibility for the mistakes, but has also blamed state government bureaucrats.

"These were career civil servants and had strong science, medical backgrounds," Snyder said Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "But as a practical matter, when you look at their conclusions, I wouldn't call them experts anymore."

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4.