Most cybersecurity professionals spend years building resumes to prove what they can do. Nisarga Adhikary’s proof was a blog post. The 19-year-old published his findings in May, detailing five critical vulnerabilities in CBSE’s On-Screen Marking portal – the system used to evaluate Class 12 board exam answer sheets. The flaws included a master password stored in plain text that allowed anyone to bypass two-factor authentication entirely. He had first reported the issues to CERT-In in February. By the time his blog went public, only one vulnerability had been patched. IIT Kanpur Director Prof. Manindra Agrawal read the post and reached out directly. This week, Adhikary joined the institute’s cybersecurity hub C3iHub as an OSINT and Threat Intelligence Engineer – among the youngest engineers the institute has ever hired. Adhikary cleared Class 12 this year. He has no plans to enroll in college and says he wants to focus on building products and startups instead. Before joining IIT Kanpur, he had already worked with several US-based startups and participated in cybersecurity competitions since Class 6.
Source: Hindustan Times
