Officials blame cyberattack for CBSE revaluation portal glitches

THe telephone exchange room of Secondary training’s (CBSE) revaluation portal was come to by a “malicious cyberattack” that disrupted defrayal processing for around 50 Class 12 students and forced the board to defer the next phase of its re-evaluation process until the payment system was secured, education ministry officials familiar with the matter said on Friday.According to a senior ministry official, the payment gateway linked to the CBSE’s revaluation portal was attacked shortly after the system went live on May 19.“There were some unauthorized attacks on the portal. The malicious cyberattack affected the payment gateway infrastructure, resulting in incorrect fee displays during transactions. Around 50 students were affected. In some cases, the fee displayed was as low as Re 1, while in others it shot up to nearly ₹67,000-68,000,” the official said.Speaking on the matter, a senior CBSE official, requesting anonymity, said, “The board is processing refunds for students who paid more than the prescribed fee because of the glitch.”Officials confirmed that no student data was breached, and the attack was only concerned with the payment interface.The portal, used by students to obtain scanned copies of evaluated answer books and apply for re-evaluation, has remained unavailable since May 26. It was originally scheduled to reopen the same day for students to submit question-wise objections after accessing scanned answer sheets. The reopening was later postponed to May 29 and has now been rescheduled to June 1.The disruption came amid an unusually high volume of applications. More than 400,000 students sought scanned copies of their answer books between May 19 and May 25, accounting for nearly one-fourth of around 1.8 million students who appeared for the Class 12 board examinations this year, the officials said.As part of the corrective measures, CBSE has removed HDFC Bank’s payment gateway from the process and integrated payment systems of four public sector banks — State Bank of India, Canara Bank, Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda, the ministry officials said.Officials said successful test runs of the new payment gateways were conducted on Thursday.Following the disruption, the board sought an independent technical review of the platform and roped in experts from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur to audit the portal’s code, payment integrations and backend systems.“These teams are examining the code and the system to make it seamless and glitch-free,” the CBSE official quoted above said, adding that the infrastructure has additionally been migrated to Amazon Web Services to improve scalability and handle heavy traffic.Earlier on May 24, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan discussed the technical and payment-related issues with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, following which it was decided to strengthen the portal’s payment architecture through public sector bank integration.CBSE officials said students who have already obtained scanned copies of their evaluated answer books will be able to submit question-wise objections once the portal reopens on June 1. The responses will then be reassessed by subject experts through the board’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.