JOHANNESBURG: South African digital news website Daily Maverick said that it had been subject to a cyber attack from India after it published a report that said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi refused to leave his aircraft because the South African government had “only sent a Cabinet Minister” to receive him.
Styli Charalambous, the chief executive officer of Daily Maverick, in a media interview, said, “I can confirm we have been subject to DDoS attacks from India”. A Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, is a kind of cyberattack designed to overwhelm a website or its server with a large amount of traffic, making it unavailable to users.
As per Daily Maverick, the incident happened On August 22 (Tuesday). It said that after Modi refused to get off the aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa dispatched Deputy President Paul Mashatile to welcome him.
“By contrast, President Cyril Ramaphosa had personally been on the tarmac to greet Chinese President XI Jinping when he arrived,” the digital news publication added.
In a statement, Daily Maverick quoted its security coordinator as saying: “…. 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.”
The news site’s Editor-in-Chief, Branko Brkic said: “It was obvious that the purpose of this attack was 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.”
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