The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Friday said it has filed a formal complaint with the Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO) Unit of Delhi Police regarding a series of coordinated and sophisticated cyberattacks targeting its post-result services portal.
In a statement, CBSE said the portal, launched on June 2 for Class 12 students to seek verification of marks and re-evaluation of answer scripts evaluated on the basis of the onscreen marking (OSM) system, was “subjected to repeated and coordinated cyber attacks over the past three days”.
The board said the attacks involved large volumes of malicious traffic originating from multiple IP addresses within and outside the country but underlined that no data breach or unauthorised access has been detected.
“The apparent objective of the attackers appeared to destabilize the platform, deny access to legitimate users, and attempt unauthorized extraction of information by the elements inimical to national interest,” CBSE said in a statement.
The board re-launched the re-evaluation portal on Tuesday and spoke about attempts by “malicious actors” to cripple the platform shortly after it went live. In a post on X on Tuesday, CBSE said there was a major denial-of-service (DoS) attack that flooded the network with 1.5 million hits within a two-minute window and over 100,000 unauthorised attempts to access files.
The portal’s rollout has been rocky. Originally scheduled for May 29, the launch was postponed to June 1, missed that deadline as well, and finally went live around 4:30 am on June 2.
As of June 4, a total of 70,433 successful applications have been received through the CBSE post-result grievance redressal process, including 7,314 applications for Verification of Marks and 63,119 applications for re-evaluation.
The board said that any disruption to the portal’s functioning has the potential to adversely impact a large number of stakeholders, “cause significant public inconvenience, and affect public order and create dissatisfaction amongst students against the board.”
The board said the attacks were successfully mitigated through continuous 24×7 monitoring and response mechanisms, with support from cybersecurity teams of IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, Digital India Corporation, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), CERT-In, and other central government agencies.
