Education ministry denies reports of data breach of candidates for JEE (Advanced) exam

The Union Ministry of Education on Friday denied reports that data of those who appeared for the Joint Entrance Exam (Advanced) had been breached.

The claims were misleading and factually incorrect, said the ministry.

The results of the JEE (Advanced), which is conducted for admissions to Indian Institutes of Technology, were declared on June 1 by IIT-Roorkee, which was the organising institute for this year’s examination.

On the next day, a social media user who claims to be a cybersecurity researcher posted that a public cloud storage linked to the result system had been configured in a way that allowed access to data without authentication.

The social media user claimed that this had exposed around 1,79,600 result records and around 1,87,300 admit card PDF files, which included the names of candidates, their dates of birth and their mobile numbers. The user also attached screenshots that purportedly showed admit cards and results-related documents.

In response, IIT-Roorkee thanked the social media user and acknowledged that the exposure of the data was linked to a configuration problem with the cloud storage device. “The same is being plugged on priority,” the institute said. “The data stored was read-only and so there was no possibility of any alteration.”

Thank you @DarthKermy72747 for pointing out the configuration issue...

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