Evaluation portal vulnerable, will fix it soon: CBSE

Nagpur: CBSE on Sunday said it is monitoring the technical vulnerabilities related to the service provider for a portal connected to students receiving their scanned answer sheets, adding that a team of cybersecurity experts was fortifying all digital assets. While CBSE did not identify which vulnerability it was talking about, their statement came hours after a X user @ni5arga, shared screenshots claiming that board stored all scanned answer sheets on a cloud server but forgot to lock it with a password. The user, who described himself as a software engineer on X, said CBSE stored their documents in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage bucket without authentication. He explained this technical loophole made it possible for anyone on the internet to browse and download scanned answer booklets and question papers from the 2026 board examinations. Even former Union minister Jairam Ramesh posted on X saying this amounts to breach of privacy of 2 million students. Ramesh alleged that CBSE fiddled with technical specifications in the request for proposal to benefit COEMPT, the company contracted to handle digital evaluation. He also pointed to folds and drop shadows visible on the leaked answer sheets, suggesting they were scanned using mobile phones rather than dedicated machines. The third RFP, Ramesh alleged, dropped the specification for robotic scanners.CBSE said, "We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly." It added, "We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set up. The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out."The board's digital evaluation initiative has landed in some controversy or the other since last week. It started with payment gateway charging either exorbitantly high fees for obtaining scanned answer sheets or ridiculously low amount. The technical issues then rolled over to students not receiving digital scanned copies, to one student reportedly getting the wrong answer sheet, the fiasco continued.