South Africa: India Hits Daily Maverick With Malicious Cyberattack After Report On Modi's 'Tantrum'

From left: Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Cyril Ramaphosa hosts, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Johannesburg, August 22, 2023.

Daily Maverick has been forced to temporarily block website access in India after experiencing a malicious denial of service attack.

Daily Maverick was forced to temporarily block internet traffic from India on Wednesday after a large-scale, malicious denial of service attack caused its site to crash. The attack came only hours after the publication of the South African media company's report of India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi's refusal to get off his plane on Tuesday.

Daily Maverick's website received 36.1 million hits (HTTP requests) from Indian servers on Wednesday, following the publication of the article headlined "Tough Love Triangle: While Ramaphosa focused on Xi, Modi threw a tantrum and refused to get off his plane" on Tuesday, 22 August.

According to officials, Modi refused to disembark from his plane at Waterkloof Air Force Base because South Africa had only sent a Cabinet minister to officially welcome him, Daily Maverick's Peter Fabricius reported. Eventually, Ramaphosa dispatched his deputy, Paul Mashatile, who left the pomp and ceremony of the China state visit at the Union Buildings and dashed to Waterkloof.

"About two hours ago, the site suddenly went down. We picked it up very quickly and started identifying a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and we investigated and found it was coming from a whole host of Indian servers,"...

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