Data of millions on CoWIN portal safe, assures govt, denies reports of ‘hacking’

The government on Thursday refuted reports of India’s Covid-19 vaccination registration platform, CoWIN, being hacked and said that the authorities are investigating the matter.

The Computer Emergency Response Team of ministry of electronics and information technology (MietY) are currently investigating the matter.

“There have been some unfounded media reports of the CoWIN platform being hacked. Prima facie, these reports appear to be fake,” the government said in a release.

Dr RS Sharma who heads the CoWIN portal and is also the chairman of the empowered group on vaccine administration also clarified that the reports of hacking of the CoWIN portal are false. “Our attention has been drawn towards the news circulating on social media about the alleged hacking of the CoWIN system. In this connection we wish to state that CoWIN stores all the vaccination data in a safe and secure digital environment,” Sharma said.

“No CoWIN data is shared with any entity outside the CoWIN environment. The data being claimed as having been leaked, such as geo-location of beneficiaries, is not even collected at CoWIN,” he further added.

Reports of CoWIN being hacked surfaced after a website called Data Leak Market said it was selling a database for Covid-19 vaccination in India. The website also said that the data of 150 million people also included their name, Aadhaar number, and location. They also clarified that they did not originally leak the data and were merely reselling the data.