1.5 Million Hits Within 2 Minutes, 1 Lakh Attempts Of Unauthorised File Access: CBSE Claims 'Barrage Of Cyberattacks' On Re-Evaluation Portal

New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) stated that as many as 1.5 million cyberattack attempts were made within just two minutes on its Class 12 re-evaluation portal on Tuesday. Notably, this took place on the first day of the opening of the re-evaluation portal, with thousands of students logging into the site to complete submissions for verification/re-evaluation of their answer sheets.

In a post on X, CBSE stated that “malicious actors” attempted to disrupt services through a “barrage of cyberattacks”. It added that the 1.5 million attack attempt on the portal within two minutes were thwarted. The Board further said that there were more than one lakh attempts to access unauthorised files. 

Despite the malicious attempts, the portal is said to be functioning. CBSE said that based on the feedback of the students, the Board has “further refined the platform” and have extended the session time limits to make the process of application for re-evaluation more “convenient and seamless”. 

"Our teams remain vigilant and responsive to ensure our dearest students are facilitated in all ways possible," it added, stating that more than 16,000 students successfully completed their submissions till 3 pm.

The reevaluation portal went live on June 2 and will remain open till June 6 midnight.

Students are being charged Rs 100 per answer sheet for verification of issues like missing pages, blurred pages, and the like. Meanwhile, Rs 25 is being charged per question for re-evaluation.

This comes after complaints from students regarding unexpectedly low marks in this year’s board examinations. Many students have linked the issue to the digital evaluation process, under which answer sheets are scanned and assessed on-screen instead of being checked physically in most cases.

Several students who downloaded copies of their evaluated answer sheets have shared screenshots on social media, claiming that parts of the scans are difficult to read due to poor image quality.

Sharing blurred pictures of answer sheets, a netizen questioned, “A CBSE student's answer sheet looks like THIS and the examiner gave ZERO. Can you even READ what's written? Because apparently the examiner could.”

Meanwhile, there is a student from Class 12 named Nisarga Adhikary, who claims to be an “ethical hacker” and allegedly hacked CBSE's production site to play the viral Bad Apple animation meme song.