Recent attacks on RSA At Blackhat 2013 this week, there was a talk saying RSA is (essentially) doomed in the near future.

networkworld.com ~ “Black Hat: Elliptic curve cryptography coming as smarter algorithms threaten RSA”

What "two devastating attacks in the past 6 months" is Mr Ritter referring to, and how real is the threat to RSA?
Behold! The slides from the presentation, as pulled from the Black Hat 2013 iSEC Partners page. The presenters are not cryptographers &mdash; they're security researchers. You can find more information about the presentation at the Black Hat website, including a brief biography of the researchers in question.

It appears that the presentation focused on advancements in the discrete logarithm problem, particularly by Joux, and less on factoring itself; instead, the argument was that since advances in the discrete logarithm problem tend to lead to advances in factoring (and vice versa), and since Joux has been making some particularly good progress in that area, RSA is thus in imminent danger.

I'm ambivalent on the matter.

To answer your question directly, I'm not sure which two "devastating attacks" the article in question is talking about. The slides, as linked above, contain links to many different results (see page 26 and onward). However, if I had to guess, I would suspect they are talking about


Joux's A new index calculus algorithm with complexity L(1/4 + o(1)) in small characteristic, published on Feb. 20, 2013, and 
Barbulescu et al.'s A quasi-polynomial algorithm for discrete logarithm in finite fields of small characteristic, published on Jun. 18, 2013.


These two papers are cited in the slides on pages 26 and 28, respectively.