To continue this thread: one of the reasons targets think the attack was 'sophisticated' is because their systems failed in unexpected ways. Nobody could've predicted exactly that failure, so they assume it was because the attackers were geniuses.
Thus, let's assume a typical attack where they spend $5 with a DDoS for higher service to hit a specific website like ci.minneapolis.mn.us/police/, but unexpectedly, a lot of other seemingly unrelated things fail.
That's because somewhere deep in some other systems is something that maybe queries the public website every few minutes, and when response time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, causes something to break.
Your assumption is that this was the goal of the hacker all along, which is helped by the fact that it is certain the "goal" fo the hacker to cause as much disruption as possible. But the reality is the hacker knew nothing and got lucky.
