Amid Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to South Africa to attend the BRICS summit, a South African news website called Daily Maverick has alleged that it was subjected to a cyber attack from India after publishing a story saying PM Modi refused to leave his aircraft because the South African government had “only sent a Cabinet minister” to officially welcome him. The article, titled ‘Tough Love Triangle: While Ramaphosa focused on Xi, Modi threw a tantrum and refused to get off his plane’, was published on Wednesday, August 23, and remains inaccessible from India as of Thursday morning.
Since publishing the report, Daily Maverick said it has been subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyber attack, where the attacker floods a wesbite’s server with massive internet traffic to prevent regular users from accessing the site. “Several hours ago, the site suddenly went down. We picked it up very quickly and started identifying a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. We investigated and found it was coming from a whole host of Indian servers,” Daily Maverick’s security coordinator said, according to a statement from the portal.
The reported on PM Modi seems to have alleged that while South African vice president Paul Mashatile planned to receive PM Modi at the air base, the latter refused to deboard from the plane. According to The Wire, it also reported that the President Cyril Ramaphosa was present to receive Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visited South Africa. However, neither the Daily Maverick’s home page, nor the story on PM Modi, are accessible from India.
“I can confirm we have been subject to DDoS attacks from India,” the chief executive officer of Daily Maverick Styli Charalambous told Scroll.
“A DDoS attack is described as a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, network or website by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic. During a DDoS attack, a site is flooded with bot traffic with the intention of taking it down for a period of time,” Daily Maverick’s security coordinator explained in the statement. He said the attack was ongoing but Daily Maverick had implemented a firewall to temporarily block Indian traffic, to protect its site.
Commenting on the attack Daily Maverick Editor-in-Chief, Branko Brkic said: “It was obvious that the purpose of this attack is to deny the people of India access to this story as no attempt was made to hide the source of the attack. This left us with no option but to block the entire domain of India to protect the integrity of the site."
“Despite these attempts and subsequent denials by Deputy President Paul Mashatile's office, Daily Maverick stands by its story and will continue to report on developments,” Brkic added. “Daily Maverick has been investigating ways to make the article accessible to India but the attack is so large, it’s proving difficult,” the statement said.
1/ Earlier today (Wednesday, 23 August), Daily Maverick published a story about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's refusal to leave his aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base because the South African government had only sent a Cabinet minister to officially welcome him.
— Daily Maverick (@dailymaverick) August 23, 2023