One Billion Consumers at Risk of India’s COVID Vaccine Data Breach

India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is investigating what it called baseless reports of a data breach of its COVID vaccine database.

The ministry said it has seen reports of Twitter users posting screenshots that show a bot using Telegram to post personal information about patients who had received vaccines, according to a Monday (June 12) news release.

“It is clarified that all such reports are without any basis and mischievous in nature,” the release said, adding that the ministry’s CoWIN portal “is completely safe with adequate safeguards for data privacy.”

Nonetheless, the ministry said in the release it has asked the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to look into the matter and issue a report, and it has also begun an internal security review for CoWIN.

“CERT-In in its initial report has pointed out that [the] backend database for Telegram bot was not directly accessing the APIs of CoWIN database,” the release stated.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for Electronics and Information Technology, tweeted Monday that although the bot was “throwing up” details from the CoWIN vaccine portal, it “does not appear that CoWIN app or database has been directly breached.”

With ref to some Alleged Cowin data breaches reported on social media, @IndianCERT has immdtly responded n reviewed this

✅A Telegram Bot was throwing up Cowin app details upon entry of phone numbers

✅The data being accessed by bot from a threat actor database, which seems to…

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar 🇮🇳 (@Rajeev_GoI) June 12, 2023

The portal was hacked last year, with data of 20,000 people sharing online marketplace forums leaked, which the government denied.

Concerns about data security are among the reasons many consumers now seek out unified platforms that aggregate healthcare information and payments into one place, PYMNTS research found.

“Healthcare in the Digital Age: Consumers See Unified Platforms as Key to Better Health,” a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration, showed that 58% of consumers believe a unified digital platform would make managing benefits and treatment more convenient.

More than half of the respondents said a unified platform would improve their access to treatment, “with 15% citing this as the attribute that is most important to them,” the study said.

Centralized information is also attractive to consumers, with 41% reporting an interest in having all their healthcare information in a single place. Meanwhile, 36% of consumers said online portals improve the security of their medical data.