I'm not sure if this is what Zykes is referring to. But this particular attack on Tor is different from a wiretap because it made traffic readable by the whole network, not only by the attackers.

In what I think you mean by a perturbation attack, the attacker would deanonymize traffic by influence timing of packets on one end and observing the other end. Only the attacker learns anything. But in this attack, the hidden service directories found a clever way of broadcasting the name of the requested service, in plaintext, to the rest of the circuit. The attackers could read the message, but so could anyone else running a Tor relay.

Given that the message could have been trivially encrypted, that does seem like pointless collateral damage.