This certainly has potential to be huge, but it's still too early to tell. If the technique can be directly applied against the common ciphers listed below, then it could render these ciphers completely impotent against a dedicated attacker.
From ComputerWorld:
Adi Shamir, who is the S in RSA, has presented material at the Crypto 2008 conference that has promised a new form of mathematical attack against a broad range of cryptographic ciphers, including hash functions (such as MD5, SHA-256), stream ciphers (such as RC4), and block ciphers (such as DES, Triple-DES, AES). The new method of cryptanalysis has been called a "cube attack" and formed part of Shamir's invited presentation at Crypto 2008 - "How to solve it: New Techniques in Algebraic Cryptanalysis".
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Without access to the paper (expected to be published later this year), the full scope of the discovery can't be easily determined. It may be that it delivers an order of magnitude improvement over existing methods, but implementation will still take such a long period of time that it is effectively impractical for attack against time sensitive content. Then again, it may be that it has brought it into a viable timeframe, something that can be achieved with a handful of modern machines - nothing that is too far out of reach of the motivated and resourced attacker. [From Computerworld - New attack against multiple encryption functions]
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