NEW DELHI: The Centre on Monday said that the CoWIN portal of the Health Ministry is completely safe with adequate safeguards for data privacy and termed the media reports claiming breach of data of beneficiaries who have received COVID vaccination in the country as "mischievous in nature".

There are some media reports claiming the breach of data of beneficiaries who have received COVID vaccination in the country, on some social media platforms. These reports allege a breach of data from the Co-WIN portal of the Union Health Ministry, which is repository of all data of beneficiaries who have been vaccinated against COVID19, the statement said.

Certain posts on the social media platform Twitter have claimed using a Telegram (online messenger application) BOT, the personal data of individuals who have been vaccinated is being accessed. It is reported that the BOT has been able to pull individual data by simply passing the mobile number or Aadhaar number of a beneficiary.

According to the statement, it is clarified that all such reports are without any basis and mischievous in nature. The CoWIN portal of the Health Ministry is completely safe with adequate safeguards for data privacy. Furthermore, security measures are in place on the Co-WIN portal, with Web Application Firewall, Anti-DDoS, SSL/TLS, regular vulnerability assessment, Identity & Access Management etc. Only OTP authentication-based access to data is provided. All steps have been taken and are being taken to ensure the security of the data in the CoWIN portal.

Union Health Ministry has requested the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to look into this issue and submit a report. In addition, an internal exercise has been initiated to review the existing security measures of CoWIN.

CERT-In in its initial report has pointed out that the backend database for the Telegram bot was not directly accessing the APIs of the CoWIN database.