The Central Board of Secondary Education on Sunday acknowledged cybersecurity vulnerabilities in its service provider’s OnMark portal, the on-screen marking system that was used to evaluate Class 12 board examination answer sheets this year.

“The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out,” the board stated.

The clarification came as several discrepancies were flagged in the last two weeks in the CBSE’s On-Screen Marking evaluation process for Class 12 answer sheets.

Many students had alleged that the scanned copies of answer sheets uploaded by the CBSE did not match their handwriting, raising concerns about possible answer sheet mismatches.

Students seeking re-evaluation also alleged that they faced portal failures, delays in payment confirmation and, in some cases, were asked to pay excess fees because of technical glitches.

Separately, a cybersecurity researcher, Nisarga Adhikary, has claimed on social media that he had discovered that the OnMark portal link was publicly accessible and that an analysis of its code showed vulnerabilities that could potentially allow accounts of examiners to be taken over.

On May 22, he said he reported the issues to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team and also published a detailed account of his findings.

The CBSE said on Sunday that it has been “closely monitoring the vulnerabilities” 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 [Indian Institute of Technology] to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set-up,” stated the board.

It added that it was “grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly”.

The statement came two days after the CBSE claimed in a social media post that the OSM system is “backed by a secure and robust IT [information technology] platform” and that “no compromise or vulnerability has been reported in the actual evaluation portal”.

The board had said that multiple quality checks and safeguards ensure that answer books are securely scanned and processed.

It also claimed that students’ answer books “are safe and have been processed through multiple quality-control mechanisms”.

However, soon after, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that the Union government acknowledged discrepancies in the OSM system and accepted responsibility for them. The minister added that strict action would be taken against anyone found to be “intentionally responsible” for irregularities in the evaluation process.

‘Mantri Pradhan’s Ministry of Scandals’: Congress

Meanwhile, the Congress on Sunday claimed that the answer sheets of around 20 lakh Class 12 students had become available in the public domain, describing it as a “data breach of monumental proportions”.

In a social media post, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh questioned the quality of the scans used in the evaluation process, pointing out that the leaked answer booklets “show signs of paper folding and shadows”.

Separately, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi shared a video of his interaction with a group of students who had raised concerns about the marking system.

Gandhi criticised the response the students had received, saying they had been labelled “Pakistanis” and “deep state agents” for raising legitimate concerns.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.