Internet Wire posted the press release, not bothering to verify either its origin or contents. This is a devastating network attack. With better planning, a similar attack could do more damage and be more difficult to detect. These were the first kinds of attacks the Internet defended itself against. Distributed protocols reduce the dependency on any one computer.
Redundancy removes single points of failure.
It would be a lie to say that we know how to protect ourselves against these kinds of attacks, but I hope that detection and response processes will give us some measure of security in the coming years. At least we know what the problem is. In our society, people tend to believe what they read. On the political scene we've seen many examples of false information being reported, getting amplified by other reporters, and eventually being believed as true. Someone with malicious intent can do the same thing.