Covid related data of thousands of Indians leaked online

Update: 2022-01-21 19:19 GMT

New Delhi: Personal data of thousands of people in India has been leaked from a government server which includes their name, mobile number, address and Covid test result, and these information can be accessed through online search. The leaked data has been put on sale on Raid Forums website where a cyber criminal claims to have personal data of over 20,000 people. The data put on Raid Forums shows name, age, gender, mobile number, address, date and result of Covid-19 report of these people.

Cyber Security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaharia also tweeted that personally identifiable information (PII) including name and Covid-19 results are made public through a content delivery network (CDN). He said that Google has indexed lakhs of data from the affected system.

"PII including Name, MOB, PAN, Address etc of #Covid19 #RTPCR results & #Cowin data getting public through a Govt CDN. #Google indexed almost 9 Lac public/private #GovtDocuments in search engines. Patient's data is now listed on #DarkWeb. Need fast deindex," Rajaharia said in his tweet. An email query sent to the Ministry of Electronics and IT did not elicit any reply.

The sample document shared on Raid Forums shows that the leaked data was meant for upload on

Co-WIN portal.

The government has heavily relied on digital technologies in terms of controlling and creating awareness about the Covid-19 pandemic as also its vaccination programme.

Meanwhile, the National Health Authority (NHA) has denied any Covid-related data leak from Co-WIN portal on the prima facie basis, saying the platform neither collects the address of people nor RT-PCR test results for vaccination, a top official said on Friday. Cyber criminals on the dark web had posted personal data of thousands of people, claiming they were from India.

"While we will enquire into the substance of the news, prima facie the assertion is not correct. The reason is that Co-WIN collects neither the address of the person nor the RT-PCR test results for vaccination. Further, we would like to assert that no data has leaked from Co-WIN portal and the entire data of residents is safe and secure on our platform," National Health Authority CEO R S Sharma said in

a statement.

The alleged leaked data has been put on sale on Raid Forums website where a cyber criminal claims to have personal data of over

20,000 people.

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