New Delhi: For Debarghya Das, it started as a simple request from two of his anxious friends who wanted to know their board results a day before they were made public.
What came of it may not only create a problem for Das, a budding software engineer, but has probably exposed the poor web security system of the country.
Kolkata-born Das, majoring in computer science, says that all he had to do was run a simple program that entered all roll numbers after defining a range to get access to all the results.
This computer science student from the US’ Cornell University claims to have broken into the system of the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and accessed the results for the entire country.
This led to loads of data crunching and statistical analysis to deduce that the “marks had been tampered with”.
“There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that the CICSE board is fraudulent and guilty of marks tampering. Whether they changed some results by plus or minus 1 or plus or minus 5 is irrelevant. Fact is, they changed some results,” wrote Das in his blog that was posted on http://deedy.quora.com.
“The Indian School Certificate (ISC) determines college admissions to a wide array of Indian colleges that impose strict cut-offs for admission. One mark can change your fate. In such an abhorrent system, even the simplest case of making a 93 a 92 could change a future. Adulteration of these marks is absolutely unacceptable,” the article further states.
Das said that he does not fear any legal action.
“I have only accessed data available in public domain. What I can definitely conclude is that regardless of whether marks were tampered with or arise out of a special policy decision, something is definitely wrong,” he said. (Agencies)