The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) reported a denial-of-service cyber attack targeted at its re-evaluation and verification portal on Tuesday night.

This incident highlights the vulnerability of critical educational infrastructure to coordinated digital strikes during high-traffic windows. The disruption occurred during a sensitive period for students seeking grade corrections and academic verification.

According to reports, the attack generated approximately 1.5 million hits within a two-minute window [1]. Malicious actors also made over 100,000 unauthorized access attempts to breach the system [2]. These coordinated efforts were designed to overwhelm the portal's capacity and block legitimate users from accessing services.

The surge in traffic caused a 24-hour delay in portal operations [3]. This outage prevented students from submitting their requests for re-evaluation during the initial window of the attack.

CBSE officials said the portal eventually resumed operations after the threat was mitigated. Following the restoration of services, the board recorded more than 28,000 successful submissions [3].

The board said the disruption was caused by malicious actors intending to disrupt online services. The scale of the attack, characterized by millions of requests in seconds, is typical of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) tactics used to crash servers by flooding them with artificial traffic.

“The attack generated approximately 1.5 million hits within a two-minute window.”

The targeting of a national examination board's portal underscores a growing trend of cyber threats against public service infrastructure. By timing the attack to coincide with a critical academic deadline, the actors maximized the potential for public distress. The recovery of the system and the subsequent processing of thousands of applications suggest that while the availability was compromised, the integrity of the submission data remained intact.