So basically this is the same as Flood and loot described in some paper 1 or 2 years ago.
Yes, and authors say
The exploited mechanisms partially differ from those used by the attacks presented in this paper, since we do not make use of multi-hop payments, but rather direct channels between nodes.
Translation from academic: we confirm Flood & Loot scheme. However, this attack was being discussed once with Anton Kumaigorodsky who was quite skeptic about attack trade-offs by itself. Attacker has to spend a lot of money to cause congestion and after attack the outcome is not clear.
Looking deeper into history there where 3 papers about LN attacks which released simultaneously, these are:
šŸ“ Counting Down Thunder: Timing Attacks on Privacy in Payment Channel Networks šŸ“ Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack On The Lightning Network šŸ“ Time-Dilation Attacks on the Lightning Network
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