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Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Sunday alleged that it has come to light that the answer booklets of 20 lakh Class 12 students of CBSE were available in the public domain and said "privacy of students has been put to risk".
In a post on X, Jairam Ramesh targeted the government on issues related to the evaluation and post-result processes of the CBSE Class 12 examinations. "Today, in the latest developments from the Minister of Scandals' Ministry, it has come to light that the answer booklets of 20 lakh Class 12 students of CBSE were available in the public domain. This is a massive data leak that has put the privacy of 20 lakh students at risk. The incompetence and insensitivity of COEMPT has once again been exposed. This is the very company to which CBSE awarded the contract after altering the technical conditions of the RFP--a change that likely benefited COEMPT," Jairam Ramesh said. "The leaked answer booklets show signs of paper folding and shadows--marks typically associated with scans done using mobile phones rather than scanning machines. We know that the requirement for robotic scanners was removed in the third RFP. This raises the question: what kind of scanners did COEMPT actually use? Why is the scan quality so poor?" he asked. Amid the ongoing controversy surrounding its On-Screen Marking (OSM) evaluation process, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Sunday said it has been closely monitoring vulnerabilities flagged in the OnMark portal of its service provider and has deployed cybersecurity experts to strengthen the system. In a post on X, CBSE said an expert team comprising cybersecurity professionals from various government agencies and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been working over the past few days to secure the platform. CBSE stated that the identified vulnerabilities have been contained and efforts are underway to ensure that no other exploitable weaknesses remain in the system. The board also thanked alert citizens and ethical hackers who pointed out potential security issues and said it had directly engaged with some of them."We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set up. The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out. We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly," CBSE said. (ANI)
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