IIT-K hires ethical hacker who flagged ‘vulnerabilities’ in CBSE portal
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT-K) has hired the 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, who exposed ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE)
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT-K) has hired the 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, who exposed ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) IT ecosystem. Adhikary will work as an ‘OSINT and threat intelligence engineer’ in C3iHub, a not-for-profit Section 8 company housed in IIT-K. Founded six years ago, C3iHub employs 200 persons of whom 170-180 are engineers. On his visit to Delhi earlier in June as part of the IIT expert team to strengthen the CBSE portals for re-evaluation and onscreen marking, IIT-K director Manindra Agarwal met with Mr. Adhikary and his parents. A team of cyber security experts including, Mr. Agarwal, sought to understand the teenager’s take on critical vulnerabilities in the CBSE portals which led to leaking of sensitive student data such as answer scripts. “I helped the IIT expert member team with security audits. They asked me to find vulnerabilities in the new post-result portal and I helped them,” Mr. Adhikary said. Agarwal told The Hindu that Mr. Adhikary “is quite bright and has a good understanding of cyber security which is useful for our company.” “He will be able to expand his knowledge base and work on various projects alongside experts of all kinds looking after various aspects of cyber security,” he said.
To encourage bright students like Mr. Adhikary, IIT-K is launching a Bachelors in Cybersecurity where the admission will not be through JEE (Advanced), Mr. Agarwal said. “Instead, the student intake will be through a hackathon. We will pick the best students and train them for the first two years on theoretical aspects of cybersecurity which will be hands on training in a controlled environment and then they will do an internship in government-run security agencies to expose them to live settings,” he said. The hackathon will be arranged in early July and admissions for an intake of 60 seats will start later in July beginning the 2026-27 academic session. “We observed that there are bright kids like Nisarga (Adhikary) who are so taken up by computer systems and understanding them that they neglect other parts of studies and don’t do well in competitive exams. To provide an avenue to this set of students we are launching this particular course,” Mr. Agarwal said. Adhikary said he has shifted his base from West Bengal to Kanpur three days ago and joined work at C3iHub on Wednesday (June 10).
Amongst all IITs, C3iHub is a one-of-a-kind company nurtured by IIT-K that has a strong group of cyber security experts which has created a number of indigenous solutions deployed at multiple places. It is involved in conducting security audits for all seaports in India and aids in ensuring digital security for Indian Census Operations. “We have a security ops centre which can monitor the security status of any large organisation. We also have a robust red team (which mimics actions of aggressive hackers) and points out critical vulnerabilities in IT systems,” Mr. Agarwal said. Adhikary said that this is his second full-time job, but a first in cyber security. He started tinkering with software development and coding at 13 and has participated in over 70 hackathons. A Class 12 pass-out, Mr. Adhikary said he was preparing for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), which paves the way for IIT admissions, between 2023 and 2025. However, he now prefers to gain practical job experience because a JEE rank is not equivalent to how technically good someone is.
In the long term, Mr. Adhikary wants to establish a start-up and is keen on working in the Silicon Valley, U.S. Though the remuneration he receives at C3iHub is “competitive”, the teenager has multiple high-paying offers from U.S.-based companies. “I am looking at applying for O-1 non-immigrant visa which is granted to individuals with extraordinary talent,” he said. Agarwal said scouting for the right technical talent is important, as high-quality cybersecurity experts are rare in India. “We need a large number of them as things move in digital domain including national security. We are seeing conflicts which involve a cyber security component and people like Nisarga can really contribute in strengthening the systems,” he said.
The BriefWire