Well, it's a break of the national symmetric encryption cypher of Russia. Changing standards like that which are used in equipment in the field is expensive. A

Well, it's a break of the national symmetric encryption cypher of Russia. Changing standards like that which are used in equipment in the field is expensive. A LOT of military equipment is going to have to be changed, and if they're using ASICs as accelerators in it they'll have to change the hardware. Some of their equipment will use software only, but quite a lot likely accelerates it with hardware. So it's certainly of historical importance. It's not often that a math paper spurs millions of dollars of changes. As for scientific importance, it's a near-practical break in a well-used cryptosystem. The breaking of DES was a similar event, and that's considered of scientific importance by the cryptography community. This isn't quite as strong a break, as building a cracker would be quite expensive, 2^101 is quite a few operations, but it's not so far outside the realm of possibility as to be unthinkable.