Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer

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In what might be the first physical attack over the Internet, hackers bombard an epileptic patient forum with images intended to trigger seizures.

Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.

"We are seeing people affected," says Ken Lowenberg, senior director of web and print publishing at the Epilepsy Foundation. "It's fortunately only a handful. It's possible that people are just not reporting yet -- people affected by it may not be coming back to the forum so fast."

The incident, possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims, began Saturday, March 22, when attackers used a script to post hundreds of messages embedded with flashing animated gifs.

The attackers turned to a more effective tactic on Sunday, injecting JavaScript into some posts that redirected users' browsers to a page with a more complex image designed to trigger seizures in both photosensitive and pattern-sensitive epileptics.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/ ... 3/epilepsy

Thats just wrong to do.

Can those hackers be found and charged with assault??? What they did is just dispicable

Scum like this deserve serious physical damage done to them.

They're ba***rds. True and simple.

Those bastards need to spend some quality time in prison.

I find them quite sad. The hackers concerned obviously have major deficits in their level of humanity.

At least the epileptics have nothing as serious wrong with them - they are still human. Those hackers are not.

Black Ice

Yeah that's pretty bad.

what a bunch of lowlifes

that is a horrid thing to do and they should be charged with assault.

i am epileptic as well (although i have seizures very occasionally and they are not caused by flashing images)

I'm epileptic my self and photo sensitive, I've seen less organised things like this happen before, like some lone idiot who thinks they are amusing posting flashing images on support sites.I'm sad to see people would do something like this but not surprised.

I do love firefox with adblock and noscript to avoid animations , although I have my monitor filtered so I can play games , people make weird flashy adds that can catch one off guard.

I think its kinda amusing though how Anonymous gets instantly blamed without much fact to back it up.

It wasn't Anonymous... the messages that started it all were placed on chan message boards, and traced back to Scientology IPs... It was Scientology pretending to be Anonymous...

Even I don't think that's funny. And I usually find trolls funny.

I'm glad everyone can agree that this is wrong.

Edit: except, of course, the jerks who did it.

FSCKTARDS! Lowlife! Scum! Windows-ME-users!

Windows-ME-users ???? millions of people did use Windows-ME some time ago , are they all scum ???

Are you something like anti-microsoft ???? (but i prefer linux also)


on topic:

this is big s**t what these idiots have done