India hits Daily Maverick with malicious cyberattack after report on Modi’s ‘tantrum’

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,” Daily Maverick’s security coordinator said on Wednesday afternoon. 

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. 

He said the attack was ongoing, but Daily Maverick had implemented a firewall to temporarily block Indian traffic to protect its site. 

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, described the DDoS attack as unfortunate, but said 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 … Diplomacy is now conducted digitally, so what happens in the real world and what happens online can also be intricately interlinked,” Allen said. 

She said it was “premature to start blaming a state actor directly”. 

“The world’s attention is focused on this part of the world because of BRICS … Whenever there is a big event, it is an opportunity for hackers to effectively refine their art,” Allen said.

But while diplomacy is conducted digitally, Allen says so is protest. 

“Anyone wanting to protest the Daily Maverick piece may also resort to those kinds of tactics,” she said. 

Chris Roper, the deputy CEO of Code for Africa, said the cyberattack on Daily Maverick shows that attacks on the media can be at both a reputational level and a technological level. 

While several Daily Maverick reporters have been subject to online abuse and attacks, this is an example of an attack on the company’s online infrastructure.

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“The idea here is both to deny access to your news, but also to cost you money,” Roper said. “What it does show is that news sites increasingly need to make sure that they have the right safety measures in place.”

An Indian official source said he did not have the technical knowledge to comment on the allegations that pro-Modi bots might have launched an attack on the Daily Maverick site. He added that the article which allegedly prompted the cyberattack “was a factually wrong story. No basis.” 

A human rights activist in Delhi, who wanted to remain anonymous for safety reasons, 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 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 blocked the airing of a BBC documentary that questioned Modi’s leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots, Reuters reported. DM