you are ignoring the fact that China (a powerful recent player in math and physics), Russia (long time math and physics powerhouse), or any number of criminal e

you are ignoring the fact that China (a powerful recent player in math and physics), Russia (long time math and physics powerhouse), or any number of criminal elements have known about these security problems and have possibly been taking full advantage of them for some time, just skipping the publicity bit. LulzSec is, among other things, shaming the companies into tightening up. Red teaming is a good thing. Edit: to be clear, I agree there's no red-team value in DDOS. Though some have ascribed a "sit-in" utility to DDOS in certain circumstances (eg: Anonymous vs MasterCard after Wikileaks broke CableGate).