NEW DELHI: Two people, including a juvenile, were arrested by the Delhi Police from Bihar in connection with their involvement in an alleged data leak from Cowin Portal. The CoWIN portal, a comprehensive cloud-based IT solution for planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of COVID-19 vaccination in India is owned and operated by the Union Health Ministry.
It has details of over 100 crore individuals, including over four crore children between the age of 12-14 and over 37 crore people over the age of 45. According to Delhi Police sources, the accused had allegedly put the data on a Telegram application.“The investigation is still going on in the case,” the source affirmed.
It was also revealed that one of the accused’s mother was working with the health department which is being probed by the police now. Notably, the government had on June 12 described the reports of the CoWIN data leak as “mischievous’ and ‘without any basis’ and assured that the data is ‘completely safe.’
However, the Centre ordered a probe by CERT-IN to look into the alleged data leak following reports that the personal information of people, including some Opposition leaders and bureaucrats, have been breached from the CoWIN portal, India’s Covid-19 vaccination tracking platform.
As the Opposition had targeted the government at that time, the Union Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, had in a tweet said a Telegram Bot was throwing up Cowin app details upon entry of phone numbers.