‘Cyberattack from India’: South Africa portal which claimed Modi ‘refused to get off plane’

A day after a report in South Africa’s Daily Maverick claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “miffed” and had “refused to get off his aircraft” in Pretoria until deputy president Paul Mashatile arrived to receive him, the portal has now alleged cyberattack from India “with a purpose to deny Indians access to this story”.

Mashatile’s office, meanwhile, has termed the report “a lie”.

The Daily Maverick report, which is now “blocked” for people in India, had said that PM Modi had “refused” to exit his plane as “only a cabinet minister” had been sent for his reception, while the African country was “heaping” attention on Chinese president Xi Jinping. Both the leaders are in South Africa for the BRICS summit.

The news portal had claimed that a cabinet minister had been originally sent to welcome Modi and deputy president Mashatile was “eventually despatched” from formalities being held for Xi to welcome Modi. It had noted that “by contrast”, Xi was personally received by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, honoured with a state visit and Order of South Africa – the country’s highest official award. “Xi certainly dominated the day,” it read, adding that South Africa has “massive trade deficit” with China. 

Daily Maverick’s chief executive officer Styli Charalambous told Scroll, “I can confirm we have been subject to DDoS attacks from India... It was obvious that the purpose of this attack is to deny the people of India access to this story.” He said the cyberattack had left the media outlet with “no option but to block the entire domain of India” to protect the site.

A DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service is a cyberattack which overwhelms a website or server with traffic, resulting in the website becoming unavailable to users.

The publication also issued a statement on Wednesday. “Several hours ago, the site suddenly went down. We picked it up very quickly and started identifying a massive distributed denial of service attack. We investigated and found it was coming from a whole host of Indian servers.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson from the office of South African deputy president Mashatile told WION: “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.”