India investigates alleged leak of personal data from covid vaccination database

“Exposing health data in this manner can have a huge impact on a person’s mental health, sense of wellbeing, relationships, work life, and access to healthcare,” said Sylvia Karpagam, a public health doctor from Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka in southern India. The health ministry denied that t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBMJ (Online) Vol. 381; pp. p1407 - 1407
Main Author Malhotra, Shefali
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England British Medical Journal Publishing Group 20.06.2023
BMJ Publishing Group LTD
Subjects
COVID-19
COVID-19 - prevention & control
COVID-19 vaccines
Cybercrime
Data integrity
Humans
Immunization
India - epidemiology
News
Public health
Vaccination
India
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Summary:“Exposing health data in this manner can have a huge impact on a person’s mental health, sense of wellbeing, relationships, work life, and access to healthcare,” said Sylvia Karpagam, a public health doctor from Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka in southern India. The health ministry denied that the CoWIN portal was breached in a press statement.3 Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister for electronics and information technology, said that the Telegram chatbot seemed to be relying on data stolen in the past.4 Hacking incidents were reported in 2021 and 2022.56 “The fact that there are old data breaches, which allows people to piece together information about the vaccination, is concerning,” Prateek Waghre, policy director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian non-profit organisation that advocates for digital rights, told The BMJ. The health ministry is now reviewing the internal security protocols of CoWIN, and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the government body that handles computer security incidents, is investigating the matter.7 On 15 June, it informed a parliamentary committee that the breach was being traced to several sources outside the CoWIN portal.8 The team is now in discussion with at least 11 Indian states that developed their own databases during the covid-19 pandemic to track containment zones and vaccination status of residents to identify any potential leaks.9 Personal information collected for covid-19 vaccination in India is not restricted to the CoWIN portal.
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ISSN:1756-1833
1756-1833
DOI:10.1136/bmj.p1407