A cybersecurity attack displaying explicit, racist and antisemitic images derailed Mississippi’s second meeting to begin the process of allocating the state’s opioid settlement dollars, further delaying the process of using the money to address addiction.
Mississippi’s Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Council was scheduled to meet Tuesday at 1 p.m. to further develop how the Legislature will allocate up to $73.3 million from companies that catalyzed the country’s overdose crisis. Unlike the council’s first meeting three weeks earlier, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office hosted the second exclusively over a Zoom video call. Public participants were not required to sign in to the meeting before joining.
About 10 minutes into the meeting, as meeting host and Fitch special assistant Caleb Pracht asked for approval of the last gathering’s minutes, a Zoom participant noticed that Pracht’s screen was partially blacked out. As Pracht tried to fix the screen, an unidentified voice interrupted the meeting and said, “Yep, that is really good to hear because…”
At that point, distorted music started playing, and an unidentified guest took control of the host screen. The screen featured a man in a sexually explicit pose, a swastika, a symbol for the Ku Klux Klan, a Confederate flag background, and a banner over the screen said “HACKED BY NUENZE.” Three other guest participants who signed in as “Robert Cage,” “Chelsea M Adams” and “Vince Garcia” had similar images as their icons.
The chaos lasted about 20 seconds until the Attorney General’s office ended the meeting. Pracht tried to move the meeting over to a conference call a few minutes later, but Fitch’s Chief of Staff Michelle Williams said that meeting was also hacked. Pracht sent out an email at 1:25 p.m. that the meeting would be rescheduled as soon as possible.
“We truly apologize, and our IT folks are looking into it immediately to address the issue and ensure it can never happen again,” Pracht wrote in an email to meeting attendees.
In a call with Mississippi Today, Williams confirmed someone had hacked the Zoom meeting, an incident she said was unlike anything the Attorney General’s Office had ever experienced before. She said she hadn’t examined the details of the graphic images enough to comment on them, but Fitch’s Cyber Crime Division would be investigating the incident.
“Somebody who clearly doesn’t care what happens to people who have been afflicted by the opioid epidemic just completely kept the committee from doing its work,” she said.
The Mississippi Legislature has tasked the council with creating a process for groups interested in addressing Mississippi’s overdose crisis to apply for some of the state’s opioid settlement dollars.
The council was set to review materials for this application process, including a newly drafted scoring rubric for applications and proposed committee assignments for reviewing grants, according to the Tuesday meeting’s agenda. Multiple committee members expressed concern that there was no grading rubric or definition of a qualified applicant in the material proposed at the last meeting.
The council is following a tight schedule to finish reviewing opioid settlement applications by Dec. 1, a deadline prescribed by the Legislature. Meeting that deadline already seemed in jeopardy at the early July meeting, when Pracht suggested delaying the launch of the application by a few weeks.
Williams said Fitch’s office continues to be focused on meeting the Legislature’s deadline. But Tuesday’s cyberattack will make it more difficult to adhere to a tight timeline.
“Whoever just did this today just shortened it.”
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Clarification 7/29/2025 — This story has been updated to reflect that Pracht suggested delaying the grant application launch.
