New Delhi: The Government of India, on June 12, dismissed all the allegations made on the Co-WIN portal for breaching users’ data.

Co-WIN portal of Health Ministry is completely safe with safeguards for data privacy. All reports of data breach are without any basis and mischievous in nature. Health Ministry has requested CERT-In to look into this issue & submit a report: Government of India pic.twitter.com/hXbTpl3FNU

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— ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2023

“Co-WIN portal of Health Ministry is completely safe with safeguards for data privacy. All reports of data breach are without any basis and mischievous in nature. Health Ministry has requested CERT-In to look into this issue & submit a report,” ANI reported citing the Government.

How did the issue ignite?

On Monday, various complaints were raised against the Co-WIN vaccination portal for a massive data breach. As the news went further, it created a situation of panic among Indian citizens-including high profile political leaders.

It was reported that the leaked data is available on the social media platform Telegram and can now be accessed by any user.

A news portal, The Fourth News, reported that personal information of Indian Citizens like, the Aadhaar card and Pan card to be available on the Messenger app Telegram. TMC’s political leader Saket Gokhale also tweeted his interactions with the Telegram chatbot.

The report added that the time when a mobile number registered with the CoWIN portal is entered, the Telegram bot immediately reveals the number and the ID card for vaccination along with gender, birth year along with the name of the vaccination centre and his\her doses.

After the incident was reported, an update from the developers of the Telegram bot came that the databases have been disabled now.

The officials talked about the issue to CNBC TV-18 and said that they have found “discrepancies in data leak of the screenshots of the CoWIN app”.

Previous Claims

There are several Opposition leaders which include:

1. Rajya Sabha MP & TMC Leader Derek O'Brien

2. Former Union Minister P. Chidambaram

3. Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh & K.C. Venugopal@derekobrienmp @PChidambaram_IN @Jairam_Ramesh @kcvenugopalmp

(2/7) pic.twitter.com/JnD5EKhPBO

— Saket Gokhale (@SaketGokhale) June 12, 2023