The Central Board of Secondary Education accepted cybersecurity certificates from Coempt Edu Teck that were nearly two years old and covered a different client’s system.
Coempt submitted two certificates to meet requirements in the August 2025 tender. One, issued in November 2023 by Prime Infoserv LLP, certified a deployment for Biju Patnaik University of Technology and had lapsed under its own validity clause. The second, issued in October 2025 by A3S Tech & Company, covered an application called OneX tested on a pre-production staging environment for the same university. Neither certificate referenced CBSE or its OnMark platform. The submissions occurred before the system processed nearly 10 million Class 12 answer scripts between February and May 2026. Researchers later identified critical vulnerabilities in the portal. CBSE invited ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary for consultations with IIT teams, which completed fixes and brought the on-screen marking portal back online on June 5, 2026.
