A 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, responded to the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) latest clarification with a meme featuring Punjabi rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh's 'Dope Shope', asserting the board had 'admitted' there were gaps in its On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
Adhikary, who had claimed to have found security flaws in the CBSE's online marking portal for Class 12, posted the meme on Sunday evening after the board said the vulnerabilities had been 'contained'. He wrote with the clip, 'how me and the boys be moving after cbse admitted that there indeed was a security breach.'
The CBSE had initially rejected the claim, saying the web address cited by Adhikary was only a testing site with sample data. However, the board later said it was 'grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers' who had flagged the vulnerabilities, and that it was 'ruling out' other exploitable weaknesses.
Adhikary had said a 'master password' in the portal's frontend code let him skip the login OTP and open the marking dashboard directly, which could have been used to change students' marks.
He had first reported the flaws to CERT-In, the government's cyber-emergency team, in February, but they were not fully fixed.
