The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Sunday said it has contained vulnerabilities identified in the OnMark portal of its service provider and is working with cybersecurity experts to further strengthen the system.The board also thanked ethical hackers and members of the public who brought the issues to its notice. “We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly,” the statement said.The statement comes after 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary alleged security flaws in CBSE’s digital evaluation ecosystem. In a blog post, Adhikary claimed he had identified multiple vulnerabilities in the On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal that could potentially allow unauthorised access to examiner accounts and evaluation functions.The board said it had been closely monitoring the issues that were recently flagged in the public domain.“We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain,” CBSE said.According to the board, a team of cybersecurity experts drawn from different government agencies and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been deployed over the past few days to secure the platform and move it to a more robust setup.“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 board said..Earlier, CBSE had rejected claims that its actual evaluation platform had been compromised. The board said the URL highlighted in social media posts was only a testing portal containing sample data and not the system used for live evaluation work.
