IT Minister Rebuffs Claims Of CoWIN Data Breach

During the Financial Express Digital Economy Conclave 2023, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar addressed the public's concerns regarding an alleged breach of data on the CoWIN platform.

He explicitly stated that personal information, such as Aadhaar and passport numbers, shared on the messaging platform Telegram, is mostly ("to a large part") fake.

He reassured the citizens that the data was not sourced from the CoWIN database.

“That so-called breach was not a breach of CoWIN. The data that the Telegram bot was throwing up was not from CoWIN,” the Minister said.

Recent news revealed an automated account on Telegram that allegedly shared critical personal information of people who had registered for the CoWIN portal for their Covid-19 vaccination. Naturally, this was concerning for the citizens.

The moment the data breach came to light, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) immediately investigated the matter.

The Union Minister stated that the data allegedly leaked was from a database owned by the individual who controlled the Telegram bot.

He clarified that it was not from any government source and certainly not from the Covid database.

Chandrasekhar further added that most of the data found in the database were fake, which was identified by CERT-In during their analysis.

Even if there is some real data, he said, Aadhaar data has been breached pre-2014 several times.

According to Chandrasekhar, the Centre is actively investigating the origins of the bot. “So how old the data is, where did it come from, and if this is a deliberate attempt to mimic a breach is being investigated."