Terming the government response to the alleged CoWIN data breach as “casual”, the Congress on Monday sought a high-level judicial probe into the entire data management apparatus of the country in order to identify the extent of danger posed to the privacy of citizens.
“I am appalled at your casual response to the breach of privacy of 1.4 billion Indians,” Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal tweeted, responding to a statement by Minister of State for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had responded to the reports of data breach and that it did not appear that the CoWIN app or database was directly breached.
Mr Venugopal said: “If a Telegram bot can throw up CoWIN details simply by inputting mobile numbers, it will not take too long for an automated software to harvest all CoWIN data within a matter of hours. This breach clearly shows that CoWIN data was not encrypted. If it were, only those with the necessary authorisation will be able to access such data, and random Telegram bots will not be able to decrypt such personal data.”
