IIT-K hires ethical hacker who flagged ‘vulnerabilities’ in CBSE portal

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Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT-K) has hired the 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, who exposed ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) IT ecosystem. | Photo Credit: The Hindu

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT-K) has hired the 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, who exposed ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) IT ecosystem.

Mr. Adhikary will work as an ‘OSINT and threat intelligence engineer’ in C3iHub, a not-for-profit Section 8 company housed in IIT-K. Founded six years ago, C3iHub employs 200 persons of whom 170-180 are engineers.

On his visit to Delhi earlier in June as part of the IIT expert team to strengthen the CBSE portals for re-evaluation and onscreen marking, IIT-K director Manindra Agarwal met with Mr. Adhikary and his parents. A team of cyber security experts including, Mr. Agarwal, sought to understand the teenager’s take on critical vulnerabilities in the CBSE portals which led to leaking of sensitive student data such as answer scripts.

“I helped the IIT expert member team with security audits. They asked me to find vulnerabilities in the new post-result portal and I helped them,” Mr. Adhikary said.

Mr. Agarwal told The Hindu that Mr. Adhikary “is quite bright and has a good understanding of cyber security which is useful for our company.”

“He will be able to expand his knowledge base and work on various projects alongside experts of all kinds looking after various aspects of cyber security,” he said.

To encourage bright students like Mr. Adhikary, IIT-K is launching a Bachelors in Cybersecurity where the admission will not be through JEE (Advanced), Mr. Agarwal said.

“Instead, the student intake will be through a hackathon. We will pick the best students and train them for the first two years on theoretical aspects of cybersecurity which will be hands on training in a controlled environment and then they will do an internship in governm