New Delhi: Nisarga Adhikary, the 19-year-old security researcher, who hacked into the system of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to expose flaws in the digital evaluation system earlier this year, has been added to the US Department of Justice (DoJ)’s Hall of Fame.
His work was acknowledged after he found a major flaw in one of DoJ’s systems, Adhikary said.
He shared a screenshot from the DoJ’s acknowledgements page that names “researchers who have responsibly disclosed valid vulnerabilities” to the department and posted “Got added to US DoJ (Department of Justice) Hall of Fame.”
He identified a critical security flaw in a major DoJ law enforcement system, which was subsequently fixed by the department, Adhikary revealed.
“I found a critical vulnerability in one of their largest law enforcement systems,” he told India Today Tech.
The teen did not disclose the nature of the vulnerability or identify the affected system though. He said the DoJ addressed the issue within a week of his report.
“I reported the vulnerability roughly a week ago, they validated and patched this within a week and credited me on their Hall of Fame/ acknowledgements page,” Adhikary said.
Explaining how he discovered the flaw, the teenager said: “I found this myself when browsing their site and by using some custom scripts.”
He was not paid for reporting the vulnerability, Adhikary told India Today.
He had reported another security issue involving a US Department of Defense/military system..
“I found a vulnerability in US Department of Defense/US military system. I reported it and after validation, they found it was valid. Remediation is still under way though,” he said.
Adhikary previously came into the spotlight after exposing flaws in CBSE’s Online Submission of Marks portal. Following the disclosures, IIT Kanpur’s cybersecurity innovation hub, C3iHub, recruited him as an open-source intelligence (OSINT) and threat intelligence engineer.