The alleged data leak of COVID-19 vaccination beneficiary details is assumed to have happened from a non-governmental database, which might have been populated by a threat actor running the telegram bot which released the leaked data, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said.
In an interview to The Hindu here on Tuesday, he said his reference to “previously stolen data stolen in the past” in his tweet on Monday was not regarding data theft from government databases. “I tweeted that very technically, maybe people didn’t understand. It is certainly not data from CoWIN or a government database. Data are probably coming from a database owned by the person who owns the telegram bot. it is not a government database. Now, whether that data inside it are false or real, that only an investigation can tell,” he said.
To a question on how real data on many personalities, including political leaders and journalists, related to their vaccination centre and personal details were seen on the database, he said that some of the data may be real, as Aadhaar data had been breached hundreds of times even before 2014.
