500,000 years ago our eyes and vision were probably significantly worse than they are today. As our eyes evolved to capture the world better our brains also evolved to correct the errors from our eyes. On the other hand, we feed into our neural networks high quality images. It's true that they are low resolution but they don't contain noticeable noise or artifacts. The attack described here is a smart application of salt and pepper noise. It's ineffective on humans because our vision evolved to filter it out, but a network which has seen only noiseless images is helpless.
I'm curious whether training the network by adding noise and other mutations to the set would make the network more resilient to this attacks. In other words, it's the training set or the network architecture that's vulnerable here?