* The Indian Prime Minister arrived in South Africa to attend the BRICS summit, which Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera is in attendance
* The site suddenly went down and we picked it up very quickly and started identifying a DDoS attack—Daily Maverick’s security coordinator
* After they investigated, they found it was coming from a whole host of Indian servers
By Duncan Mlanjira
South African digital news website, the Daily Maverick reported on Wednesday that it had been subject to a cyber attack from India after it published its report that Prime Minister Narendra Modi refused to leave his aircraft because the South African government had “only sent a Cabinet Minister” to receive him at Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria.
The Indian Prime Minister arrived in South Africa to attend the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) summit, which Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera is in attendance.
A report by Scroll.in quotes Daily Maverick’s chief executive officer, Styli Charalambous as confirming the development, saying they have been subject to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from India, which is a kind of cyberattack designed to overwhelm a website or its server with a large amount of traffic, making it unavailable to users.
This follows a report by the Daily Maverick on Tuesday, August 22 that said Prime Minister Modi refused to get off the aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria after South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa sent a Cabinet minister to officially welcome him.
Ramaphosa, who had personally been on the tarmac to greet Chinese President XI Jinping when he arrived earlier on Monday night, then dispatched his deputy President Paul Mashatile to welcome the Indian PM.
Scroll.in quotes a statement from Daily Maverick’s security coordinator as saying their “site suddenly went down”, adding that they “picked it up very quickly and started identifying a DDoS attack” and after they investigated and they “found it was coming from a whole host of Indian servers”.
The news site’s Editor-in-Chief, Branko Brkic is quoted as saying: “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.”
But on the same Wednesday evening, the office of South Africa’s Deputy President denied the story with its spokesperson telling the Indian news channel WION that: “Every aspect of what the Daily Maverick reported is a lie”.
“The Deputy President was well aware ahead of time that the Indian PM would be arriving and he would be receiving him,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. “He was there well before the PM landed.”
But Daily Maverick said in its statement that it stands by the story and “will continue to report on developments”.
Modi finally disembarked from his plane
A report by Daily Maverick’s Victoria O’Reagan says its website received 36.1 million hits 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’ published on Tuesday, August 22.
Daily Maverick has been investigating ways to make the article accessible to India, but the attack is so large that it’s proving difficult.
Consultant on emerging digital threats at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Karen Allen told the Daily Maverick that the DDoS attack was unfortunate, but added that it was “hard to say” whether the attack was directly linked to the story about Modi.
“There may be sympathisers of Modi who may have decided to act in this way,” she was quoted as saying. “Diplomacy is now conducted digitally, so what happens in the real world and what happens online can also be intricately interlinked.
Chris Roper, the deputy CEO of Code for Africa, is quoted as saying the cyberattack on Daily Maverick shows that attacks on the media can be at both a reputational level and a technological level.
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A human rights activist in Delhi, whom the Daily Maverick withheld their identity for safety reasons, is quoted as saying was shocked to learn of the scale of the attack, which had forced Daily Maverick to protect its site by blocking internet traffic from India.
The activist reportedly said it is not unusual for the Modi government to block media reports critical of his government, but a DDoS attack of this nature by Indian servers was a new one.
In January 2023, India reportedly blocked the airing of a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots as reported by world news agency, Reuters.
Meanwhile, the expansion of the five-nation BRICS club of emerging economies has been described as “historic” by Chinese President Xi Jinping, but it is still not clear how far the countries’ common interests stretch — as reported by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Thursday.
Xi Jinping is quoted as saying the growth of BRICS “will further strengthen the force for world peace and development” when he addressed the leaders gathered at the Summit in Johannesburg.
The report said BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are often seen as a counterweight to the Western-led world and the six new countries — Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are set to join in January.
China is reported to be the state pushing hardest for group expansion as a way to counter Western dominance.
The BBC quotes Steve Tsang, director of London’s Soas China Institute, as saying though the Brics members do not have much in common on the surface, President Xi was trying to show his fellow bloc members that they all want a similar future: none of them want to live in a Western dominated world.
“What the Chinese are offering is an alternative world order for which autocrats can feel safe and secure in their own countries,” Prof Tsang is quoted as saying. “They can find an alternative direction of development without having to accept the conditionalities imposed by the democratic Americans and European powers.”
Vladimir Putin addressed the summit via a video link
Russian President Vladmir Putin joined by video link from Russia because of the danger of being arrested over alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The BBC said in his remarks, Putin once again took aim at Western powers, saying their “neo-liberalism” posed a threat to both traditional values in developing countries and to the emergence of a multi-polar world where no one country or bloc dominated.
“Without naming names, it was clear who President Putin was speaking about — the United States,” says the report.
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