The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) re-evaluation portal was hit by a large-scale cyberattack involving nearly 3.8 million malicious packages on June 3 in an attempt to disrupt the ongoing verification and re-evaluation process, a board official said.
Within minutes of going live on June 2, the portal blocked more than 100,000 unauthorized access attempts, one official said. Many coordinated attacks with high volume of traffic that resemble distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have been mitigated by security systems.
“The traffic profile showed coordinated spikes in demand consistent with DDoS attack patterns. However, the security architecture deployed on the platform succeeded in mitigating the threat and ensuring continuity of services,” a CBSE official told ANI.
The re-evaluation portal is launched
The council had received 70,443 applications by June 4 through the post-result grievance redress mechanism. These requests include 7,314 requests for mark verification and 63,119 requests for re-evaluation, officials said.
The reassessment portal, which was scheduled to go live on June 1, was launched one day after an emergency security hardening exercise was conducted in relation to concerns regarding the successful implementation of the OSM system.
“Before activation, the system underwent penetration testing, vulnerability assessments and load testing with specialist cybersecurity support. The launch was postponed to ensure that all identified vulnerabilities were addressed and that the platform can handle high traffic volumes,” an official revealed.
Once the security checks were completed, the portal was activated around 4:30 a.m. on June 2 and recorded nearly 1.5 million access requests within the first two minutes of its launch despite unauthorized attempts being blocked and rejected in real time. The platform has remained stable with over 8,000 concurrent users despite facing the threat of cyber attacks and high traffic volume.
There have been no confirmed cases of student data breach to date. Post-event safety reviews are currently underway.
OSM Controversy
The controversies surrounding the OSM system were highlighted after several complaints of missing pages, unmarked answers and discrepancies in scanned copies of answer books by students. The Ministry of Education initiated a review of the implementation and procurement aspects of the project, which looked at vendor performance, contractual obligations, and quality control mechanisms.
Subsequently, a parallel investigation was launched, led by S. Radha Chauhan, Chairperson of the Capacity Building Committee, to examine the procurement and implementation aspects of the project.
Rahul Singh and Himanshu Gupta were transferred as part of the administrative response with Prashant Lokhande being appointed as the new Chairman of CBSE and Varun Bhardwaj becoming the new Secretary of the Board.
Technical audits on the matter have been initiated with the support of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Scanning and platform-related deficiencies identified during the audit process are addressed through corrective measures.
