The government said in a statement today that the CoWIN system, which is used to register people for COVID-19 vaccination, is completely secure and that reports of it being hacked “appear to be false.”
Regardless, the matter will be looked into by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Computer Emergency Response Team, which is known as the government’s best counter-hacking group (MietY).
CoWIN “stores all vaccination data in a safe and secure digital environment,” according to the Health Ministry and the chairman of the Empowered Group on Vaccine Administration (EGVAC).
“The CoWIN platform has been hacked, according to some unfounded media reports. These reports appear to be fake at first glance. The Health Ministry and the EGVAC, on the other hand, are having the matter investigated by MietY’s Computer Emergency Response Team “In a statement, the government said.
CoWIN data is not shared with any entity outside of the system, according to EGVAC Chairman RS Sharma.
“Our attention has been drawn towards the news circulating on social media about the alleged hacking of CoWIN system. In this connection we wish to state that CoWIN stores all the vaccination data in a safe and secure digital environment,” Mr Sharma said in the statement.
“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 by CoWIN,” Mr Sharma said.
Except for Aarogya Setu and Umang, there is no official mobile app for registering for vaccinations in India. Even in both cases, booking vaccination slots requires logging into the CoWIN portal via the apps.
CoWIN also has a public application programming interface (API) that allows any third-party application to gain access to certain unrestricted data that can be shared with its users. In CoWIN, this is limited to read-only access.
“The extent of access will be limited and in case of any misuse impacting the performance of CoWIN solution will result in blocking any such application and entities as per the policies of MoHFW (Health Ministry) and taking any other appropriate action in accordance with law,” the government’s API Setu website says.
