Disconnection DOS attack?

Add me to the list....2nd time its happened...guy offers me a draw in a lost position...i decline next thing i know both sides time is blinking my internet has a DNS problem and i lost. Egypt player i think twice. Very strange and seemed some how deliberate. Next time i wont hit the decline button and just let time run maybe.

I doubt that this is even possible.

Where would your opponent get your IP address in order to DDOS you? Chess.com does not connect players with each other... it connects each player (separately) to the chess.com server, and just passes the result of the move to the other player.

Not sure. What I do know is it happened both times while i was winning and after they offered a draw in a losing position. I Clicked the X button and not sure if that sends a signal at that moment of some sort. This time they said after i hit the X ....ok as you wish? I have a TCP program and it was going crazy opening and closing scvhost. the "ok as you wish" message after i declined is what made it somehow feel on purpose, but how i have no idea. Both times flash when it happens....about the time my time would of ran out ....boom im back and still logged in but when i exited the playing page there was a message in a white box that popped up ....i guess from chess.com that i never seen before and i cant now for the life of me remember what it said ....i think i clicked ok and was back in playing hall then. At the time I had two pages at chess.com opened because i had hit the help button when the DNS problem was over. Is what it is i guess....no biggie.

What browser do you use? I use Edge...supposedly designed to work in Windows 10

I sometimes get a strange bug where I seem to have a good connection and so does my opponent. They seem to be taking a long time to move, ie I'm watching their clock run, but when I move I suddenly lose a great chunk of time.

I asked my opponent and got told that on his side I was disconnecting a lot.

It seems to get fixed by closing and reopening the browser. 

I use Chrome....I talked with the other player....they said i just appeared offline and after a minute i lost. On my side i never left and when my connection resumed i was still logged in....just the playing page was dead and gave that message when i left it. My main computer in the house was still connected but i was on my laptop so i have no idea what happened.

First of all, some people may not be clear with what a DDOS attack is.

It stands for Direct Denial Of Service and is when someone sends empty packets of information to your IP address (There are other means but this is the most common).

Getting so many empty packets can disconnect the device. And as for finding IP's it is not very difficult if you have the tools to ping your opponent. Once you have their IP you can send a bunch of empty packets using a program like LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) that can be run on android and pc's.

Then: It can take a while to DDOS so it is probably not worth the 5-10 rating points.

the video from that Russian cell is obviously a laggy connection. if you lag by more time in seconds than you have on the clock, that might be a cause for a time warp where suddenly, to your surprise you loose on time. 

I have noticed this as well. In fact it just happened to me. I was using a VPN which has been stable for months. I was playing a 5 minute game with a player "Chessnesis" when in the final minute I lost internet connection. Not just chess.com. I realized what was happening and disconnected from the vpn and my internet connection returned. If I read someone stating this I would call it the writer a bad loser. But this is not the first time this has happened. I haven't checked how security works for chess.com but it is very odd that when I get into these situations the odds of connectivity issues skyrockets. Write this off as speculation if you want.

That won't work on chess.com. There is NO connection between opponents, and therefore no possible way that your opponent can get your IP address. Each player connects to the server independently. They do NOT connect to each other.

In order for your opponent to get your IP from chess.com, they would need to compromise and take over the server itself... in which case why would they bother scamming a few rating points by disconnecting someone? Why not simply GIVE themselves hundreds of free rating points, and while they are at it, they might as well take all the credit-card info that paid members use to pay for their memberships, and steal everybody's money.

These DDOS accusations are simple paranoia. 

bolt@eater:~$ curl -s -I chess.com | grep Server
Server: nginx

prolly just ubuntu or cent. 

I use firefox and it happens to me as well.  Must be some way the person I am playing has found my IP and began a DDOS, and these people are not good at chess, as they may think.  I am always really destroying them and suddenly my chess lag is one red bar, ridiculous. 

We need some more buffers to protect our connections to the server..

DDOS - Distributed Denial of Service

Inside Job ;>

That is not correct. The player's clients never directly communicate. All traffic goes through the Live server process and the only packets relayed to the opponent include the moves made, correct clock times, and chat. Your opponent never accesses your IP and can't disconnect you.

Any attempt to send DDOS traffic would likely result in the sender being bounced or lag a lot. 

Happened to me too. Every time it was when I was in a winning position or a lot up in time. If it smells rotten and feels rotten then it must be rotten.

Blueemu and Martin_Stahl are right, it simply can't be DDOS.

The most likely reason is that this is a case of confirmation bias. Not to be dismissive, its just a well known psychological phenomenon that afflicts a lot of people. If you were to do some accurate reporting of the games you were disconnected from, I think you'd find on average the count was roughly the same regardless of whether you were winning, losing, or just plain even.

There is, however, always the remote possibility that they are hacking into the server, and lagging you out, because they get some twisted pleasure out of it, and that its not about rating points or stealing credit card information, though I'm not even sure if they store the latter on this site. That's more something you have a third party like Paypal or Stripe handle...but even if chess.com did store that info it would almost certainly be hashed using a non-trivial algorithm. Plain text password storage is the first thing you learn not to do when managing databases. So anyway, if you notice that you lag out when playing the exact same player, and it happens multiple times, maybe you can report it to chess.com, and they can do something about it.

I don't know if this is relevant, but I experienced being disconnected, and it turned out that it was my router's firewall blocking my own PC, based on a "flood attack" diagnosis. However, I have no way of confirming that this was related to chess.com's way of transferring data, but I supect it, since there were few other programs using the network (an ownCloud client, an inactive bittorent client). I increased the treshold for blocking in the firewall, and the problem seems to be gone. This may hardly be  explained as any kind of attack by an oponent, rather as a false positive, I guess, that must have been caused by (hopefully) legitimate network activity from my PC.

if you think that there is no hacker slick enough to get your IP from playing a game of internet chess, then you Mr. Psychologist, you are the crazy one. I can think of household name CEOs of tech companies that could likely do it with one finger tied behind their back. For a good hacker with his favorite toolkit, it would likely only take a few seconds to get it. 
but you are right about motivation. And yes, 99.75% of the people complaining about it are actually fussing about their own provider. there is no hacker who has time and interest in cheating at chess. Likely this tool is just being tested here where the risk of discovery is less, then applying it somewhere for a greater purpose.. like another game server.