India Investigates Reports of Covid Portal Breach, Data Leak

(Bloomberg) -- India’s government is investigating reports that a health ministry portal containing personal data from anyone in the country who received a Covid-19 vaccination was breached.

Most Read from Bloomberg

• Africa’s Richest City Is Crumbling Under Chaos and Corruption

• A Goldman Partner’s Sexually Explicit Video Led to Millions in Settlement

• Crispin Odey’s One-Week Downfall Was Decades in the Making

• Social Security Benefits Targeted for Cuts by House Conservatives

• Alphabet Selling Google Domains Assets to Squarespace

Across Twitter, users have posted screenshots of a bot using Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, to pull individual data from mobile phone numbers entered into the portal.

Among the personal details revealed were a person’s social security and passport numbers, as well as their date of birth. The leak could potentially affect more than a billion Indian citizens who were administered at least one vaccine dose.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for Electronics and Information Technology, said on Twitter that while the bot was “throwing up” details from the CoWIN vaccine portal, it doesn’t appear to be a direct breach. India’s Health Ministry in a statement on Monday said that the reports were “without any basis and mischievous in nature,” adding that the portal was “completely safe with adequate safeguards for data privacy.”

Telegram said they had taken down the bot. “Telegram moderators routinely take down any private data shared without consent, and this has also been done in the case of this bot,” the spokesperson said on Monday.

This isn’t the first time the portal has been hacked. In January last year, news reports said data belonging to some 20,000 people had been leaked onto online marketplace forums, which the government denied.

Divyanshu Jindal, a New Delhi-based researcher looking at geopolitics and technology, said the timing of the incident was significant with Prime Minister Narendra Modi set to travel to the US for an official state visit this month.

“The India-US tech partnership is a point of focus for the upcoming visit, and the India stack is something that has been widely praised for showcasing India’s digital capabilities,” he said, referring to the infrastructure designed to bring the entire population into the digital age.

(Updates with expert comment from seventh paragraph.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

• Microsoft’s Sudden AI Dominance Is Scrambling Silicon Valley’s Power Structure

• Is AT&T’s RTO Mandate a Mass Layoff in Disguise?

• When a Huawei Bid Turned Into a Hunt for a Corporate Mole

• A Saudi Airline Embraces Luxury to End Emirates and Qatar’s Gulf Dominance

• How Nvidia Became ChatGPT’s Brain and Joined the $1 Trillion Club

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.