CBSE Updates on OnMark Portal Vulnerability Containment and System Security

CBSE: In view of increased social media attention and claims made about the digital assessment system, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has put out an official clarification about the visual effects of scanned answer sheets on its OnMark website. In light of complaints made against shadows and folds that could be seen in certain answer sheets, the Board has officially clarified that these are only minor effects produced due to fast scanning. The CBSE Board has assured all candidates and their parents as well as examiners that this will have no effect on the readability of the written content.

In order to achieve absolute transparency and precision, an expert team of government cybersecurity experts and technical experts from the IITs are currently working on an exhaustive secondary audit of the imaging repository. In this regard, the board has made it clear that the original physical copies are completely safe and secure. Moreover, CBSE has also started following stringent quality control measures with the service provider; in case there is any issue of readability due to any scanning glint in the digital copy, the digital version is immediately replaced by another one.

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…

— CBSE HQ (@cbseindia29) May 31, 2026

CBSE Clarification on Scan Quality and Document Integrity in OnMark Portal

• CBSE highlights the concerns that were highlighted on social media regarding the presence of page folds and shadows in some digitally scanned answer scripts.

• It is a minor technical problem which emerges as a result of logistics, due to the processing of the documents through high-speed processes.

• During the process of scanning of several million copies of bound pages through the help of high-intensity scanning instruments, a shadow may emerge around the fold margins.

• Technical experts from the government institutions and IITs are performing an audit of the repository in order to ensure complete readability of the text.

• CBSE guarantees all the individuals completely that the answer scripts of the students have been completely safe from any form of damage.

• The digitized version represents the answer script completely without causing any sort of loss of data.

CBSE Refutes Claims of Public Data Breach

The 19-year-old hacker Nisarga Adhikary reported the exposure of CBSE's digital answer sheets and question papers of the year 2026 by an AWS bucket misconfiguration which resulted in public access without any authentication. According to him, any person was able to access and download multiple institution documents due to security vulnerability in cloud storage. Taking advantage of the news, the Congress leader Jairam Ramesh called it a major data breach in which two million students were compromised. It came soon after the hacker's previous reports about the vulnerabilities in OSM portal of CBSE. But CBSE denied the allegation and said that the exposed link was a testing site with sample data only.