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NEW DELHI: Most teenagers fresh out of Class XII are still picking a college. Nisarga Adhikary, all of 19, has instead landed a job at one of India’s top engineering colleges.Adhikary, who cleared his board exams only this year, has been hired by IIT Kanpur as an Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and threat intelligence engineer at C3iHub, its cybersecurity innovation hub. The job materialised after the storm he kicked up over CBSE’s digital exam system.Earlier this year, as the board rolled out on-screen marking (OSM) system— under which examiners grade scanned answer sheets online — Adhikary began probing the publicly accessible parts of the set-up. He says he found serious loopholes: a master password sitting in plain sight in the portal’s code, an OTP check that ran on the user’s own browser and a flaw that let one user retrieve another’s records. Adhikary also flagged a cloud bucket that, by his account, left scanned answer sheets and question papers open to anyone online.He reported it all to CERT-In in Feb before going public, and the disclosures snowballed into a national debate over student privacy and exam security.His blog post caught the eye of IIT Kanpur director Manindra Agrawal, who got in touch with him. “We are always scouting for talent that can help us build a stronger cybersecurity wall,” Agrawal told TOI, adding the institute had quietly inducted a few young engineers into the same team years ago. He could not confirm whether Adhikary was the youngest hire, though he was definitely among them. The director left no room for confusion about Adhikary’s profile. “No. He is on a full-time job, not here to study.” On the salary, which neither side put a number to, Agrawal said it was fixed in accordance with the institute’s analysis.Adhikary, according to reports, was less guarded. Used to dollar-paying projects for US firms, he said while the salary was decent, it was a shade short of his expectations. When asked if the teen who exposed CBSE would be deployed on the board’s systems given that IIT Kanpur works for the board, Agrawal said, “That will hinge on the future course of action and requirements.”
