Tension Released As Centre Government Assures CoWIN Portal’s Safety; Calls Report “Mischievous”

A report came up in the early part of Monday claiming that data registered over CoWIN – the government portal for registration of the Covid-19 vaccine was leaked over Telegram. Now, in the later part of the day, the Centre government has assured that the data is completely safe. In addition to this, the Centre government stated that the reports are “mischievous”.

Union Health Ministry issues statement related to CoWIN safety

A statement issued by the Union Health Ministry said, “Co-WIN portal of Health Ministry is completely safe with safeguards for data privacy… Only OTP authentication-based Access of Data is provided.”

The Centre even listed out the security measures – “Web Application Firewall, Anti-DDoS, SSL/TLS, regular vulnerability assessment, Identity & Access Management,” among other things.

Further,the Union Health Ministry has ordered an investigation into the matter. The government’s computer emergency response team will look into this matter and submit report on the same.

Followed by this, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister for Electronics and Technology tweeted that Indian CERT are reviewing this matter in depth.

Also Read: Cyberspace Still Not Safe In India! CoWIN Database Leaked Over Telegram: Reports

It all started from here..

South Asia Index tweeted in the morning to share the news on data breach in India. The tweet said, “Just IN:— Major data breach in India; Personal data of all vaccinated Indians have been leaked online. ☆ Leaked data has Aadhaar, voter ID, Passport numbers & mobile numbers of Indians who got covid-19 vaccines.”

Then the opposition party reacted to this data breach and alleged that the leaked data includes information of high profile personalities. According to the report, the Telegram bot published the ID card number, gender, birth year, name of the vaccination centre, and the individual’s doses when a mobile phone is registered with the CoWIN portal is entered.