Many Forces Want To Undermine CoWIN: Union Minister On Data Breach

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrashekhar on Tuesday assured that the personal details of Indian citizens provided on the Telegram application were not leaked from the CoWIN app even as the data included the location of their last Covid vaccination.

Chandrashekhar alleged that there are many forces and interests in the world that want to undermine the CoWIN app used for vaccination registration.

"The alleged breach of CoWIN was one more instance of people trying to target the CoWIN app," Chandrashekhar said.

"The country's nodal cyber security agency CERT-In is investigating the matter. Yesterday prima facie they already reported that the data reported by the Telegram bot was not from the CoWIN app. Data was either fake or had been collected from some other source by some third-party threat actor," he added.

Opposition parties, including Congress and TMC on Monday demanded an inquiry into the data breach claims and asked the government to take deterrent action.

Congress leader Karti Chidambaram alleged that personal data of every single Indian who got the COVID-19 vaccination is publicly available and asked why the government was sitting on a data protection law.

"In its Digital India frenzy, GoI has woefully ignored citizen privacy. The personal data of every single Indian who got the COVID-19 vaccination is publicly available. Including my own data. Who let this happen? Why is GoI sitting on a data protection law?" Karti Chidambaram tweeted.

TMC claimed that the personal information of senior politicians and journalists including their mobile numbers, Aadhaar numbers, Passport numbers, Voter IDs, and details of family members were freely available on the portal.

However, the government said that the Co-WIN portal of the Health Ministry is completely safe with safeguards for data privacy and the reports of data breach are without any basis and "mischievous in nature."

"It is clarified that all such reports are without any basis and mischievous in nature. The co-WIN portal of the Health Ministry is completely safe with adequate safeguards for data privacy. Furthermore, security measures are in place on the Co-WIN portal, with Web Application Firewall, Anti-DDoS, SSL/TLS, regular vulnerability assessment, Identity and Access Management etc," said the health ministry.