There is a study about 2 possible bitcoin attacks. The one is the 51% attack (majority power attack) and the other is the "segmentation" attack.
Is there any discussion about the "segmentation" attack?
download the PDF from here
"BitCoin -- Ruven Chu and Andrew He"
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs259/WWW11/ There is no discussion, because there is not much to discuss. They say, that if you can split Bitcoin mining power in two parts of comparable size and halt communication between them, then you can perform segmentation attack, good luck with the first part. The how part they mentioned is to spoof IRC peer discovery, it is a MAJOR oversimplification.
Jeff Garzik pointed out that Bitcoin-Qt no longer operates using the IRC bootstrap, and on inspection hes right.
Does Bitcoin still use the IRC channel?Satoshi Client Node Discovery