If these attackers had been reading the RFCs years ago, these problems
would have been fixed on a much smaller network, causing less total
disruption. But of course they were exploiting other security holes at
the time. Security holes DON'T get fixed until they are exploited
on a large scale, this applies to gaping lapses in Internet design, due
to its origin of "cooperative" networks, things like sendmail and bind
defaulting to "trust everyone", i.e. sendmail relaying, and bind
additional RR poisoning.
There simply are too many things broken for someone to considering
fixing all the known issues before they are abused. But
eventually we will see source filtering and "no ip directed broadcast",
but if sendmail relaying is any indication, it will be another year
and 1/2 before the first 90% of the problem is fixed.