CoWin Portal Safe, Says Centre, Calls
Data Leak Reports "Mischievous"
A report has claimed that sensitive personal information of several politicians, bureaucrats, and individuals - who had signed up on CoWIN - was shared by a bot account on Telegram.
New Delhi: The Center has confirmed that data on the CoWin portal - the country's Covid-19 vaccination tracking platform - is completely secure following a breach of personal data recorded on the portal. The Center says the reports are "malicious".
"The Health Ministry's Co-WIN portal is fully secure with data protection measures...Only OTP authentication based access to data is provided," the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.
Social media platform Telegram leaked sensitive personal information of politicians, bureaucrats and others, news portal South Asia Index said with data this morning. The leaked data reportedly includes Aadhaar, voter ID, passport and mobile phone numbers of people who received the Covid-19 vaccine, South East Asia Index said. "With this major breach, information about all Indian family members who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 has also been leaked," another tweet said…
In a statement, the center listed security measures including "web application firewall, DDoS protection, SSL/TLS, regular vulnerability assessment, identity and access management."
The statement also said that the Union Health Ministry has asked CERT-In - the government's computer emergency response team - to investigate the matter and submit a report. Soon after, Union Electronics and Technology Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar tweeted: The opposition Trinamool Congress claimed that the leaked information includes Rajya Sabha MP and senior party member Derek O'Brien, senior Congress leaders P Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh and KC Venugopal, Rajya Sabha MP. . President Haribansh Narayan Singh, Rajya Sabha MPs Sushmita Dev, Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena. He even added screenshots to his tweets.
The Telegram account that shared personal data has been inactive since morning. Botti apparently showed the person's name, the official ID they used to vaccinate, and where they vaccinated. It also has the date of birth and passport numbers of people who have updated CoWIN for foreign travel.
CoWIN is integrated with Aarogya Setu and UMANG applications. UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New Age Governance) provides a single platform to access Pan India e-government services from Central Government to Local Government.
