March 29th, 2008
Hackers Attack Epilepsy Forum; Cause Headaches, Seizures
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
And people wonder why I have doubts about the future of the human race. An attack by hackers occurred last weekend on the user forums of the Epilepsy Foundation of America (EFA), “the national voluntary agency solely dedicated to the welfare of the more than 3 million people with epilepsy in the U.S. and their families.”
Apparently hackers went into the forums and laced messages with first animated GIF images, and then Javascript in an attempt to trigger seizures in users.
It should be noted that the forum at the National Society of Epilepsy (NSE) in the U.K. was subjected an identical attack last weekend.
Of those diagnosed with epilepsy, 3 - 5% are of the photosensitive type, in which seizures can be triggered by visual stimuli.
Both sets of forums have since been cleaned up, but why would anyone do this? Messages on the forum indicate that some even wondered about ever coming back to the forums. In this EFA thread Bella2 said:
So, it really freaked me out, the events of last week. Disgusting, graphic pictures kept popping up and I got the worst headache ever. I’m sure all of you had the same. I’m sure there were some who had seizures, too. I force quit my computer and all was normal again. The next day, I asked my husband to check it and it seemed fine too but I have been avoiding this site because I didn’t know how long it would take to clean it up.
Here’s a “thank you” note for the hard work the EFA did in cleaning up the forums.
And here’s a general thread at the NSE about the problems of last weekend.
To make matters worse, the hackers laced the forums with viruses and trojans as well. It was noted by Southie in this thread, that her AV program caught the following:
Keylogger
Keystroke
Back-Door
JS/Popupper
Why would anyone do this? And who would do this? As I said previously, it just goes to show that there are some pretty evil people in the human race.
Wired seems to think it was the group Anonymous, which has been waging a cyberwar against Church of Scientology, but I see no reason why they would attack the EFA and NSE. Apparent members of Anonymous have posted on the EFA boards denying responsibility, and actually positing it was the Church of Scientology that attacked the sites, which makes no sense either.
In the end, while it does matter, we will probably never really know who attacked the sites. More importantly, the sites should take some steps to prevent the issues from occurring again: simply disabling Javascript and images in forums posts would be a good first step.
And let’s hope this sort of thing never happens again.
Paul says:
That’s just a new low. It’s one of those things that makes you lose faith in humanity. I’m glad to hear it’s hopefully all fixed by now though.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Bel-Airanon says:
I should probably add that one motivation is that I don’t want things to result in control of the internet because it’s the final bastion of freedom, and ultimately anons are nothing more than that. Because of freedom of information, within hours of saying “perhaps we’ll never know” the culprits will be known. It was a very small faction of users at 420chan.org who have been against the anti-Scientology movement, having said on numerous occassions that they admire CofS for being able to get rich by lying and destroying their opponents. They’re mostly petty kids who want to feel special about themselves by being feared, and combined their efforts with Office of Special Affairs to pull off something like Operation Freakout with willing collaborators and many victims. There’s no such thing as “Anonymous” the group, at least nothing more than a group of people who remain anonymous online to share information under an environment of zero-censorship. This has resulted in malicious behaviour at times, but the overwhelming majority opinion is against it and profoundly pissed at those responsible–http://not420chan.com/i/ and Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs.
March 30th, 2008 at 11:24 am
RyAnne says:
We already knew that before the Wired article went up.
It was also 7chan/b/
They’re as much against the scientology protestors, whom they call newfags, as anything else.
Using Anonymous isn’t wrong, but it’s kind of generic. Anonymous is a meme, and anyone can be anonymous.
The b groups, however, are just what they call themselves, and it’s not at all surprising it came from them.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Anonymous says:
http://www.not420chan.com/i/ - The invasion came from there. However, view the link in FireFox, with No Style (and do turn off images, as they can be graphic). The original thread is gone now (I love all the chan’s, but my main homes are 4chan and 7chan), so when I saw them planning to blame 7chan to take the heat off themselves of course I got righteous. - Also, “invasions” are lame. “I ‘hack’ by signing up for member accounts on message boards then posting image links or scriptlets!” Whatever!
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:54 am
Anonymous says:
I lol’d
April 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Anonymous says:
420chan simply did what we do best being the horrible monsters the internet allows us to be.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Anynom says:
…failed cos people actually know what happened? ;_;
May 12th, 2008 at 8:17 am
ani says:
no entiendo muy bn el ingles..
:D
June 1st, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Cody says:
Ass holes
August 6th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Bobby says:
I agree. Ass holes!
August 6th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Chris says:
Shut the fuck up.
This is a serious topic.
Bitches
August 6th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
cvv_lord says:
ship dell=20$
ship hp =20$
June 21st, 2009 at 8:50 pm