CoWIN data breach: Was data of lakhs of users leaked? Centre breaks silence, dismisses rumours

After reports of an alleged CoWIN data breach broke out, the Central government stepped forward to issue an official statement regarding the same, saying that the data of lakhs of Indians who have their details registered on the website is safe.

CoWIN is a government platform designed by Centre during the Covid-19 pandemic vaccination drive where people had to register their Aadhaar card and mobile number for booking vaccination slots. Last night, media reports said that the data of CoWIN has been leaked.

It was reported yesterday that the personal details and private data of lakhs of Indians have been leaked from CoWIN and are available on the social networking site Telegram. However, the Centre confirmed that there is no such leak, and the data is completely safe.

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.”

With ref to some Alleged Cowin data breaches reported on social media, @IndianCERT has immdtly responded n reviewed this

data being accessed by bot from a threat actor database, which seems to…

— Rajeev Chandrasekha (@Rajeev_GoI) June 12, 2023

The official statement of Centre further reads, “Certain posts on the social media platform Twitter have claimed using a Telegram (online messenger application) BOT, the personal data of individuals who have been vaccinated is being accessed. It is reported that the BOT has been able to pull individual data by simply passing the mobile number or Aadhaar number of a beneficiary.”

Centre further assured all the users that the personal data on CoWIN is under the protection of a Web Application Firewall, Anti-DDoS, SSL/TLS, regular vulnerability assessment, Identity & Access Management and other security systems.

Further, Union Minister of Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar also confirmed that there is no data breach in the CoWIN platform, and confirmed that a Telegram bot was just randomly throwing up data when a phone number was typed in.

However, Opposition parties claimed that several leaders including TMC MP Derek O'Brien, Congress's senior leaders P Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh and KC Venugopal and other politicians have lost their data on the CoWIN app.