This quickly became the top trend worldwide on twitter and everybody who's anybody knew about SEA and the hack. I'm sure many people in NYT office ran around like headless chickens trying to fix this, but it really isn't that bad. You're probably thinking "any deface is bad" or probably what NYT is thinking "all the lost ad money". These are not major issues. They just quickly jumped onto a new domain ( even used their server ip for a short while, derp) and it was over. What would have been worse would be if a exploit kit or JDB (java drive by) was uploaded. If this happened then everyone has the right to lose their sense of reality and go crazy, but it didn't. In reality all they did was upload a sentence to a popular website. No malware, no dodgy ad clicks, no file bombs. 

This hack was a plain and simply a show of force. Showing American journalism and the government that SEA can reach them at anytime,on any domain and for what ever reason. I'm sure SEA has the knowledge and funding to create a huge botnet, probably in the hundreds of thousands but they don't. This hack is unique in the fact it was such major websites but without social media, what would it of been?