A new trend has lifted its ugly face these last few months with an attack against the EFA (Epilepsy Foundation of America) from a month ago (March 28th) and against blind surfers earlier this year.

Earlier this year a spyware attack stole a blind persons red tipped virtual cane by turning off their screen reader-- effectively leaving the blind person without a way to navigate.

In March (3-28) someone loaded the forums of the Epilepsy Foundation with hundreds of animations that causes seizures in about 3% of people with Epilepsy. There are about 50 million people with epilepsy in the world. That makes 150,000 people vulnerable to flashing images. The medical term is 'photosensitive'.

The Epilepsy Foundation had to close their site one day and they have a new rule: no animation, GIF files, or rich text can be posted anywhere on their site.

Photosensitive epilepsy can be triggered by video games or old an TV that flickered when the horizontal positioning was off. Video games are also known to trigger seizures. But those are cases the person with photosensitive epilepsy can avoid and the results are not intentional. These animations were deliberately placed where a sensitive person is most likely to run into them. Creating these images wasn't accidental either since it would take a lot of work to get the animations to flash at just the right frequency.

While an epileptic seizure is not as physically painful as many people claim, there is a rare kind of seizure that can be fatal. Someone is playing with fire in another persons living room.

Do the perps know how malicious and painful these attacks are? I doubt it. Do they care how juvenile and immature they are? Again, I doubt it. The 13-year-old script kiddies of a decade ago look so much more mature compared to these "hackers" (I use word extremely liberally here).

We need a new term for people who perpetuate these kinds of attacks: Babies bullies from hell? The kind of bully that is so lame that they only attack easy targets that are not able to stop them.

references

New EFA posting rules:
http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/efforums/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=12&threadid=77480&enterthread=y
The EFA statement about the attack:
http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/aboutus/pressroom/action_against_hackers.cfm