CBSE row: Nisarga Adhikary, teen who exposed OSM flaws, lands IIT Kanpur job, but...

Nisarga Adhikary, the 19-year-old famed for exposing major flaws with the CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, has again made headlines for being one of the youngest people to land a job at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur.

Adhikary was appointed Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Threat Intelligence Engineer at IIT Kanpur’s technology innovation hub C3iHub this week, as per his LinkedIn profile.

This comes after IIT Kanpur director Manindra Agarwal reached out to Adhikary directly after the latter ethically hacked the CBSE's OSM portal, exposing the flaws behind it in a May 22 post that the board first denied, but was eventually forced to accept.

He identified five critical flaws in the OSM portal, including the fact that a master password kept within plain text, which, when found, enabled users to bypass the two-factor authentication entirely.

Though he alerted India's cybersecurity watchdog, CERT-In, to the issues that could lead to massive leaks of personal data, only one vulnerability was patched, while the remaining flaws remained until the portal was eventually taken down.

“Nisarga Adhikary has been appointed as an engineer in our cybersecurity team ... he is certainly among the youngest engineers to have been hired by the institute,” Agrawal said, as per a Hindustan Times report.

Though he was excited about making the jump from software engineering, a field in which he has worked before, to cybersecurity, which he said was "more of a hobby", Adhikary admitted that he wasn't too keen on the salary he would receive.

"The salary is decent, but I was expecting a bit more. I’m used to working on projects and with companies based in the US, and I do miss the financial advantage that comes with earning in dollars because of the USD-INR conversion,” he said, adding that he was focused on building things people use, rather than academia.

Adhikary's LinkedIn profile also shows that he reportedly interned at multiple places as a software engineer, including a Singapore-based company called Cypherock, after seriously pursuing cybersecurity as a hobby since Class 6.

Efforts made by Adhikary and the two other teens who went viral for flagging issues with CBSE's OSM system—Sarthak Sidhant and Vedant Srivastava—have since led to increased scrutiny of the system, and CBSE officials undergoing a probe alongside NTA officials.