Elyments recovers from cyber attack, sees surge in user-base

Amid the India-China military stand-off at the eastern Ladakh, indigenous social media application Elyments suffered a cyber attack last week.

On the launch day (July 5), Elyments, developed by Sumeru Software Solutions Pvt Ltd faced Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)-style cyber-attack with two million malicious requests a minute. This apparently hampered the user experience and registration process via One-Time-Password.

"The attacks came from different parts of the world from thousands of servers, which is a typical pattern of DDoS attacks. It is a malicious disruption aimed at crippling and interfering with normal traffic of the targeted server. Apart from this, there was significant traffic coming in from various countries which are not really expected to be major adopters of Elyments, according to the developers. The focus of all the attacks was to bring systems down by overloading the servers," Rajesh Krishnamurthy, one of leaders of Elyments app development team said to DH.

Elyments app website (screen-grab)

The Elyments app continues to face the DDoS threats, but app developers, after learning lessons are successfully fending off the cyber attack. It can be noted that the Elyments app is developed and managed by over 1,000 Indian Information Technology (IT) experts.

“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. 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)," Krishnamurthy added.

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Meanwhile, it has managed to breach two million download mark within a couple of weeks of the official debut on Google Play and Apple App Store. The Elyments app has managed to score 4.7 average ratings and is trending as the top three app in the social media category on both the mobile OS platforms. Currently, it has one million daily active users.

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