I think you might be right. The spreadsheet is now showing the estimated difficulty to be -1.92%, although the 3 day moving average is lower at -3.71%

If this drop is being caused by the DDOS attacks, then I am surprised that it is lasting this long, although it could be that pools that were being used by a large corporate farm(s) were affected, and all their miners were effectively kicked offline and for whatever reason were never brought back online.

I would say that if I do not end up winning then the contest will likely roll over because the difficulty will probably decline by more then what I predicted.