CBSE: Re-evaluation portal under cyber attack by ‘malicious actors’

Payment failures, login hurdles, and an alleged cyberattack disrupted the first day of the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) re-launched re-evaluation portal on Tuesday, with several Class 12 students reporting severe difficulties in accessing critical services, even as thousands successfully submitted their applications.

- Sanjay Maurya

Earlier in the day, CBSE took to social media to allege that “malicious actors” had attempted to cripple the platform shortly after it went live— days after its original launch date. The disruption, the board said, included a major denial-of-service (DoS) attack that flooded the network with 15 million hits within a two-minute window, over 100,000 unauthorised attempts to access files, while maintaining that the portal at one point supported nearly 14,000 concurrent users, with over 28,000 successful submissions as of 10 pm on Tuesday.

“The CBSE revaluation portal is currently supporting over 8,000 concurrent users. As of 3 PM today, more than 16,000 students have successfully completed their submissions. While thousands of students accessed the CBSE re-evaluation portal today, malicious actors attempted to disrupt services through a barrage of cyberattacks. Most recent being a denial of service attack attempt causing 15 million hits on the portal within a matter of 2 minutes and more than 1 lakh attempts of unauthorised file access,” CBSE said in a post on X.