For the past few hours, there are N number of reports in Indian and International media that da-ta related to vaccinated Indian populace was accessed by hackers and was leaked on a social media platform Telegram, which is owned by a Russian entity.
It is unclear who is behind the attack. However, the BJP led government has announced that the breach news broadcasted on certain private news channels was not true and the data of all the vaccinated populace was totally secure from the access of threat actors.
For those uninitiated, Cowin.gov.in is a platform that was launched in the year 2020 and was a centralized repository serving the citizens for Covid vaccinations and related assistance. It was probably the first in the world to achieve the benchmark of vaccinating the populace of 160 crores or 1.6 billion-appx.
The Health Ministry of India issued a statement that some misinformation was being planted in the media about the CoWIN portal and it could be the mischief of the opposition Congress Par-ty led by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.
On the other hand, a few of the noted congress politicians such as the party chief Mallikarjun Kharge posted a few screenshots scrapped from Telegram on Twitter to authenticate the data leak on Cowin portal as true.
Cybersecurity Insiders has learnt that the leaked info includes sensitive details of citizens of the subcontinent and that includes Aadhaar Data, Vote ID, PAN Card Info, Vaccination info of the individuals who took the vaccine shots between September 2020 to November 2021, their booster dose info, if any; and their contact details along with their physical address. As the website doesn’t keep a record of date of birth’s, the DoB breach, as reported by certain section of media is false. But of course, all such info is available in Aadhaar though!
The telegram channel that led to the information leak was officially disable and government is facing pressure from the opposition political party to allow citizens to delete their data saved on the servers by logging in with their credentials, respectively.
NOTE 1- The information from the Cowin database is also shared with UMANG app that acts as a centralized platform to avail e-Gov services from central to state govt services.
NOTE 2- On June 12, 2023 a South Indian reputed Malayalam News source named Manorama Daily was the first to leak the news to the Indian populace.
