Successful is as successful does
Saying that successful attacks were not particularly elegant is rather empty. If the attack gets through, it is a powerful and dangerous attack.
Mike Tyson was not the most elegant boxer, but he won a lot of fights.
Our systems are extremely porous all around and it is *by design*. Sure, there are *tons* of bugs and errors in judgment there, but the entire infrastructure is in a shambles. Why? Because people with a great deal of control over the system need to be able to track, force their way into systems and disable systems. Making everything truly secure would secure it against them as well.
Nobody in a position to do anything about security is serious about it, but if they were, DNS would be distributed, we would be on a *successor* to ipv6 already instead of struggling to even get ipv6 adoption, encryption would be the *rule*, not the exception, encryption keys would be measured in Mbits or more instead of Kbits and less, etc.
We do not even have properly consistent universal PKI.
My browser would not rely on a set of root certificates issued by untrustworthy entities that include, it would seem after NSA revelations, attackers.
etc.