CBSE Revaluation Portal Faced Cyber Attack, Affecting 50 Students

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) revaluation portal experienced a significant cyber incident, with its payment system falling victim to a 'malicious attack' that resulted in unauthorized access for approximately 50 students. This disruption, widely reported by multiple credible news outlets including ET Education, Rediff.com, The Indian Express, and Hindustan Times, caused severe anomalies in the fee displays for re-evaluation applications, fluctuating drastically from as low as Re 1 to nearly Rs 67,000-68,000. The incident, primarily linked to the HDFC payment gateway integrated with the CBSE post-result portal, first came to light shortly after the revaluation system went live around May 19, 2026. Government sources indicated that the unauthorized access, whether 'out of fun or out of mala fide intention,' led to these erratic fee fluctuations for about 50 students. In response to the growing concerns and technical difficulties faced by students, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan held discussions with Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on May 24, 2026, to address the payment and technical issues associated with the CBSE post-result and revaluation processes. Subsequently, it was decided that four public sector banks—State Bank of India, Canara Bank, Indian Bank, and Bank of Maharashtra—would be integrated to assist CBSE in strengthening its payment gateway infrastructure and its integration with the post-exam portal. Furthermore, experts from prestigious institutions like IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, along with the Digital Infrastructure Corporation of India, were deployed to examine the system's code and architecture to ensure a seamless and glitch-free operation. The re-evaluation portal, which was initially scheduled to become operational on May 26, 2026, and then postponed to May 29, 2026, finally went live on June 2, 2026, after emergency security hardening exercises were undertaken. However, the challenges did not end there. On June 2 and 3, 2026, the newly operational re-evaluation portal faced further large-scale cyberattack attempts, including Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks generating nearly 1.5 million hits within two minutes, and over 100,000 unauthorized access attempts to files. CBSE officials confirmed that these malicious efforts aimed to disrupt services and gain unauthorized access, but asserted that the security systems successfully mitigated the threats, ensuring the continuity of services and no confirmed compromise of student data. This incident is set against the backdrop of a broader controversy surrounding CBSE's new On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, which was implemented for the Class 12 board examinations in 2026. The introduction of OSM led to a notable drop in the overall pass percentage and triggered numerous complaints from students and parents regarding blurred scanned copies of answer sheets, missing pages, mismatched answer sheets, unmarked answers, and unexpected marks. While CBSE initially clarified on May 27, 2026, that a reported security breach in an OSM portal was merely an internal testing platform and not the actual evaluation system, the board later admitted to vulnerabilities in its OSM portal on May 31, 2026, promising fixes and migration to a safer environment. The government has, however, defended the OSM system as 'the future' of evaluation, despite these ongoing issues and calls for reforms in the digital evaluation mechanism. The comprehensive response from the government and CBSE underscores the seriousness of the cyber threats to critical educational infrastructure and the commitment to ensuring fairness and transparency in the examination and re-evaluation processes, which directly impact the academic future of thousands of students across India. Efforts are ongoing to make the systems robust and secure against such malicious interventions.

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