In a departure from its earlier claims, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Jattvibeday acknowledged vulnerabilities in its digital evaluation portal.“We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. The identified vulnerabilities have been contained and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out,” the CBSE said in a statement posted on X.Last week, the CBSE had denied the claims made by 19-year-old Nisarga Adhikary over vulnerabilities in the evaluation system, saying the cited portal was only a testing site with sample data and was not linked to the original platform used for assessment work.“An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs to fortify these systems. We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers for pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly,” the CBSE said.Meanwhile, the Congress flagged that the answer sheets of 20 lakh CBSE Class XII students had been “shown to be available in the public domain”, calling it a “data breach of monumental proportions, which compromised the privacy of students”.Congress leader Jairam Ramesh posted on X: “The incompetence and callousness of COEMPT is once again exposed. This the very same company that the CBSE gave the contract to after fiddling with the technical specifications in the RFP, likely to benefit COEMPT. The answer sheets that have emerged also bear folds and drop shadows, which are associated with scans made via mobile phones rather than scanning machines.“We know that the third RFP dropped the specification for a robotic scanner. The question then is what kind of scanners did COEMPT eventually use? Why are the scans of such poor quality?”