Currently, there are about 5-6 pools who mine around 75% of the whole Bitcoins. If you target those pools with DDoS attacks, you can make them unstable, failing, etc. The result would be 4 times slower Bitcoin network.
Sure, new pools may show up. It will take some time, though. And they can be targeted, too.
Actually, I think that the above is already being performed by SOMEONE.
This completely wrong. I'm tired of people spouting off this nonsense. If all the pools dropped, people would mine solo.
If you look at deepbit, when it was hit by DDOS, everyone switched. There was no "loss" of pooling.
Or are you assuming all of us mining are NOT greedy bastards and would flounder around saying "AHHH POOLS ARE DOWN NO MORE MINING!?" If anything we are greedy and would start mining like mad thinking that deepbit is down and therefore 1/4 the total pool. (Completely wrong.)
No, there's no worry about DDOS and then someone taking over the network that way.