Key facts
- 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary has been appointed as an OSINT and Threat Intelligence Engineer at IIT Kanpur's C3iHub.
- Adhikary gained prominence for exposing security flaws in the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) digital infrastructure.
- His allegations included publicly accessible scanned answer sheets and question papers due to cloud storage misconfigurations.
- Adhikary also claimed to have found vulnerabilities in the CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal.
- C3iHub is IIT Kanpur's cybersecurity innovation hub focused on safeguarding national critical infrastructure.
IIT Kanpur has recruited 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary to join its cybersecurity hub, C3i, as an OSINT and Threat Intelligence Engineer. Adhikary recently gained national attention for identifying several technical vulnerabilities in the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) digital systems.
Adhikary officially joined the IITK C3i hub on June 9. His allegations included that scanned answer sheets and question papers were publicly accessible due to cloud storage misconfigurations, and that vulnerabilities existed in the CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal. He stated he reported these flaws to CERT-In before public disclosure.
The C3i hub is a key component of India's cybersecurity infrastructure, focusing on safeguarding critical national infrastructure and addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities. An expert team from IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Madras was involved in securing the CBSE portals.