In a significant cybersecurity incident, Indian grocery delivery startup KiranaPro has suffered a catastrophic breach, resulting in the complete deletion of its application code and servers containing sensitive customer data. This cyber attack was confirmed by the company’s co-founder and CEO, Deepak Ravindran via Tech Crunch, attributing it to unauthorized access via a former employee’s credentials
KiranaPro, launched in December 2024, operates as a buyer app on the Indian government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), facilitating grocery purchases from local shops and supermarkets. The platform boasts a user base of 55,000 customers, with 30,000–35,000 active buyers across 50 cities, processing approximately 2,000 orders daily.
The breach was discovered on May 26, when executives noticed anomalies while accessing their Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. Hackers had gained access to KiranaPro’s root accounts on both AWS and GitHub, leading to the deletion of all Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and the company’s application code .
Security Measures and Breach Details
Despite employing Google Authenticator for multi-factor authentication (MFA) on its AWS account, the attackers managed to bypass security protocols. Chief Technology Officer Saurav Kumar noted that the MFA code had changed during login attempts, indicating unauthorized access. The team can now only access the system through the Identity and Access Management (IAM) account, which shows that the EC2 instances no longer exist. However, without root access, retrieving logs or further information remains impossible .
Ravindran shared security logs and activity files indicating unauthorized access via these credentials. The company has reached out to GitHub’s support team to help identify the hacker’s IP addresses and other traces of the incident.
Operational Impact
The cyberattack has rendered KiranaPro’s app incapable of processing orders, effectively halting its operations. This disruption is particularly significant given the company’s unique voice-based interface, which allows users to place orders using voice commands in multiple languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and English .
Prior to the incident, KiranaPro had ambitious plans to expand to 100 cities within the next 100 days. The breach has not only stalled these expansion plans but also raised concerns about data security and operational resilience in the rapidly growing quick-commerce sector .
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