It was slowing down on it's own regardless of ddos attacks.
You know what that means? Buy buy buy hardware!
This difficulty level is still *massive*.
Soloers and pools under 20ghash/s are undergoing 15-30 day rounds or worse. Some small startup pools might never find their first block at this rate because people will drop out after a month of not finding anything.
The fact is, the bigger your pool the safer your income is at the moment. Variance swings are huge at 1.56m difficulty for small miners. Some people wont be able to cope with month-long rounds & will join a pool that regularly pays every day.