Quick Commerce Platform KiranaPro’s App Code Destroyed In Cyber Attack

Quick commerce platform KiranaPro has reportedly been hacked, impacting all its data and sensitive user information.

KiranaPro cofounder and CEO Deepak Ravindran told TechCrunch that the “destroyed data” included the company’s app code as well as user data in the form of names, mailing addresses and payment details, on its servers. 

Even though KiranaPro’s app is online, the platform is not processing orders. 

The incident came to light on May 26 after KiranaPro executives, while logging into their Amazon Web Services account, reportedly noted that hackers had gained access to KiranaPro’s root accounts on AWS and GitHub. 

As per the report, the platform was attacked after someone gained access to the startup’s systems via a former employee’s account. KiranaPro’s chief technology officer (CTO), Saurav Kumar, reportedly said that the attack likely happened between May 24 and May 25.

Kumar reportedly said that although the company used Google Authenticator for multi-factor authentication on its AWS account, the authentication code had changed when executives attempted to log in last week.

Upon logging in, KiranaPro employees found that all their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services, which let clients access virtual computers to run their applications, were deleted.

“We can only log in through the IAM [identity and access management] account, through which we can see that the EC2 instances don’t exist anymore, but we are not able to get any logs or anything because we don’t have the root account,” Kumar reportedly added.

Meanwhile, the company is said to have reached out to GitHub’s support team to help identify the hacker’s IP addresses. Ravindran also reportedly said that the startup is in the process of filing cases against its former employees, who had “not submitted their credentials for accessing their GitHub accounts to check their logs”.

There still appears to be no clarity on how the cyberattack exactly happened. 

Founded in 2024 by Ravindra and Deepankar Sarkar, KiranaPro is a quick commerce platform that partners with local retailers and kirana stores to deliver groceries in 10-20 minutes. It connects the customers with their neighbourhood kirana stores via the ONDC network with the help of its voice-based AI model. 

Backed by the likes of TurboStart, Unpopular Ventures, Blume Ventures and Snow Leopard Ventures, the startup has raised more than $188K in funding to date. 

Earlier this year, the company told Inc42 that it was targeting to add 100 Mn users and at least 1 Mn kirana stores to its platform.