The Union Health Ministry has eliminated the captcha code verification step earlier than bookings on Co-WIN, based on a report in Times of India on Friday. The report, citing a central authorities officer aware of the matter, stated that the federal government has additionally restricted numerous slot searches per person on the portal, which is more likely to stop bots or browser extensions from routinely trying to find slots. “Captcha was origially launched to discourage distributed denial-of-service (DDos) assaults, however it’s proving to be an inconvenience for reserving slots. With expertise advancing, easy captchas might be tampered with and the introduction of extra advanced captcha’s would have proved inconvenient to customers,” the officer was quoted by TOI as saying.
The officer also told the daily that additional security measures are now in place on the portal. He said that the number of searches for a slot has now been restricted to 15-20, after which the portal will log the user out. This, he said, would prevent bots from playing with our systems and carrying out multiple searches at any point in time. It was recently reported that people were making browser extensions to bypass captcha on Co-WIN, with claims that such programmers could automatically book appointments on the portal, including entering the code.
Founders of apps that use Co-WIN API to alert users on the availability of vaccine slots said that the additional security measures introduced on June 3 are in fact, helping people to book slots manually.
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