Economists from the 19th and mid-20th centuries can be forgiven for not anticipating an interconnected digital realm like the Internet with its p2p distributedarchitecture, but modern economists cannot be.
The attack built by Giannetsos and his colleagues has a wider target than the power grid: any system that uses sensor mesh networks, from buildings that use the sensors to monitor for weaknesses in their architecture to sensors distributed in forests to detect wildfires.
Microsoft's Distributed Systems group utilized a new file system architecture, dubbed Flat Datacenter Storage, over a full bisection bandwidth network to burn through the competition.