Subscribe Now! Get features like
A 19-year-old who claimed to have found security flaws in the CBSE’s online marking portal for Class 12 responded to the board’s latest clarification with a meme — a clip of Punjabi rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh’s ‘Dope Shope’ — asserting the board had “admitted” there were gaps in its On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
Nisarga Adhikary, an ethical hacker who said he had also alerted the government of the tech gaps, posted the Honey Singh meme on Sunday evening after the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) said the vulnerabilities had been “contained”.
He wrote with the 16-second clip, “how me and the boys be moving after cbse admitted that there indeed was a security breach (sic)”.
Asked by HT whether he would hack the portal again, he said, “My work is done.” He deleted the mic-drop post, then put it back up within a couple of hours. A comment under it read: “20 grace marks for the song choice!”
‘Dope Shope’, released in 2011 on the album ‘International Villager’, is a track by Honey featuring vocalist Deep Money; and remains a party anthem despite controversies over its lyrics referencing drugs and alcohol.
In its post on X, the board did not name Nisarga Adhikary or anyone, but said the identified vulnerabilities had been “contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out”, and that it was “grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers” who had flagged them, some of whom it said it had contacted directly.
Adhikary, who calls himself a hobbyist cybersecurity researcher and sat his Class 12 exams this year, had said a “master password” in the portal’s frontend code let him skip the login OTP and open the marking dashboard directly. That was enough to change students’ marks, he claimed. He said he first reported the flaws to CERT-In, the government’s cyber-emergency team, in February, but that they were not fully fixed.
CBSE’s response shifted over the week. On May 26, it rejected the claim, saying the web address he cited was only a testing site with sample data, and that the operational evaluation portal, at a different address, had not been compromised.
Nisarga Adhikary is one of three teenagers whose posts have driven the controversy over the OSM.
Vedant Shrivastava, a Class 12 student from Delhi, went viral on May 23 after he said the Physics answer sheet CBSE sent him during re-evaluation was not his and did not match his handwriting. The board later said it had examined his case and sent him the correct copy.
Sarthak Sidhant, 17, from Jharkhand, published a blog alleging that CBSE changed eligibility and technical rules across three tender rounds to favour the OSM vendor, Hyderabad-based Coempt EduTeck. The board and the company have denied any wrongdoing.
Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi met Vedant and separately shared Sidhant’s blog, calling India’s Gen Z “brilliant and fearless”.
OSM, which replaces the posting of physical answer books with scanned copies marked on screen, was used at scale for Class 12 for the first time this year and has drawn complaints of blurred scans, missing pages and mismatched answer sheets. CBSE has denied that it was deployed without adequate training and testing.
As for Honey Singh, he has been in a comeback phase after rehab from his admitted addiction to hashish and alcohol.
Recently he put up a video with BJP leader Tarun Chugh, who described him as a role model that youth of Punjab should follow in how to come out of addiction.
The 43-year-old music producer has spoken openly about a long battle with addiction that derailed his career, and said narcotics were destroying Punjab. The state is set for elections in about nine months.
Leave a Reply