To be honest I was a little disappointed when I saw this talk.
Agreed. The technical sophistication of the described spear-fishing attack was certainly low, using 10-year-old software and requiring the victim to enable macros, when prompted, after opening the excel spreadsheet. The only takeaway from this talk was that a dozen or so fishing emails were related together by the excel spreadsheet metadata.
Certainly not worthy material for the front page of HN, in my opinion.