The 19-year-old has been recruited as an Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and threat intelligence engineer at IIT Kanpur’s technology innovation hub, C3iHub. The teenager got the coveted job through a viral blog post detailing crucial security flaws he discovered in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal rather than through any traditional means of securing a job, as would be expected. On reading his analysis, IIT Kanpur Director Manindra Agrawal contacted Adhikary directly, saying that he does not think that he is the youngest recruit in the institute’s history, but he is definitely among the youngest engineers that have been recruited by the institute.
These flaws have fanned an already simmering controversy regarding CBSE’s hasty move towards digital marking. Investigations showed that the qualifications were lowered in order to award the contract to a third-party vendor, who was reported to have submitted old and irrelevant cybersecurity certificates to the bidding process. Adhikary has found that he had reported five critical vulnerabilities to India’s cybersecurity authority, CERT-In as early as February. These weaknesses included a master password on the site that was stored in plain text, which could allow users to completely bypass two-factor authentication. The teen reported that just one vulnerability was remediated before the portal was ultimately shut down.
As part of his new contract at IIT Kanpur, Adhikary (who finished his Class 12 exams this year) will study publicly available information and look for security flaws that can be used to patch software vulnerabilities. Adhikary began his cybersecurity pursuit at age 6 and has since been an active participant in ethical hacking competitions. Adhikary at the age of six years old started competing in ethical hacking competitions for years. He and the university did not disclose his exact salary, but he said it was less than he expected, in part because he missed out on the financial benefits of working for American startups, as he freelances and earns in US dollars.
As for the future, the young engineer says there is no plan to pursue higher education; rather, his desire is to start companies and develop consumer products over academia. Recently, director Agrawal worked with a joint task force from the IIT to assist the CBSE with its portal glitches following the results, and he met Adhikary in New Delhi to complete the hiring process. Agrawal commended the boy’s undeniable talent and said that this would be a perfect place for the kid to develop his high-level technical skills in future at IIT Kanpur.