The indigenous social media platform Elyments, an initiation of spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, has been facing cyber-attacks from hackers in China and Pakistan, according to intelligence inputs.
“Almost immediately after launch there was a phenomenal amount of malicious traffic. In fact, within 4 hours of launch, there was a coordinated attack with the intention of forcibly bringing down our systems. This ended up severely hampering user experience and the failed OTPs. It took us two days to bounce back,” Rajesh Krishnamurthy, who is a part of the leadership team at Elyments, said.
The cyber experts working with Elyments said the app came under a vicious DDoS attack with 2 million malicious requests a minute. A DDoS is a malicious disruption aimed at crippling and interfering normal traffic of the targeted server.
They said attacks came from different parts of the world from thousands of servers, which is a typical pattern of DDoS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attacks.
However, the issue has now been resolved.
“Users, who were earlier unable to register due to the DDoS breach, are now able to do so seamlessly in no time. A lot of users have reported saying the app is quite fast, and the user interface is easy to work with and engaging. People are able to chat, call, and post seamlessly,” he said.
More than 1 million people have been using the app each day and the app at present has 57k reviews with a rating of 4.5.
Developed by over 1,000 Indian IT professionals and inspired by global spiritual master Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Elyments had 1 million downloads on Day One.
Now it has two million downloads and continues to trend among the top 3 in the social networking category in App store and Play Store.
“Each day after the initial attack we are successfully fending off more than a million malicious requests from different parts of the world. Our software defenses are successfully holding up,” Rajesh Krishnamurthy said.
“We use this opportunity to encourage ethical hackers to help us counter this flood of malicious traffic by reporting any issues that still exist in our systems, using our Responsible Disclosure Policy (available on the Elyments app),” he added.
“We are deeply committed to being a social media super app that India just loves. We are moved by the support of many who have stood by Elyments. Thank You, India,” Krishnamurthy said.
