@NME this is not a new exploit, it was discovered Tue Jul 28 14:27:18 UTC 2015 by Pieter Wuile who also patched it before disclosing the vulnerability
Bitcoin avoided the problem by making a protocol change before the bug was disclosed. We can't do that anymore so we have to make a fix.
In bitcoin, this issue was solved with BIP66. Read here for more info:https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-July/009697.html
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0066.mediawiki
read all about it here https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/issues/100
basically, it is kind of a noob attack imo, some scriptkiddy went through all the bitcoin commits/patches and tries to attack altcoins with it which haven’t patched the vulnerabilities yet
edit: maybe the question should be, are there still more known vulnerabilities like this that need to be patched?