The Central Board of Secondary Education shifted all evaluation records from Coempt Edu Teck to government-controlled infrastructure on June 6, 2026.
Coempt Edu Teck denied any technological failure, attributing swapped and blurred Class 12 answer sheets entirely to physical scanning errors.
Ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary exposed critical security vulnerabilities, demonstrating live production server access and an unauthenticated AWS storage bucket.
The Central Board of Secondary Education migrated all evaluation records from Coempt Edu Teck's servers to government-controlled infrastructure on June 6, 2026. The board retained the company's platform solely for ongoing re-evaluation scanning.
Following student complaints of blurred or swapped answer sheets, CBSE initiated proceedings to impose financial penalties on the company under Service Level Agreements, according to Times Now said.
Coempt denied any technological failure in a statement issued Thursday, June 18, 2026, blaming a swapped answer sheet entirely on physical scanning errors, The Indian Express reported.
"We have identified the location and the individual who conducted the scanning. We have verified 100 per cent that, technologically, there is no error in this case," the company said.
Hacker Exposes Vulnerabilities
Complaints over access to scanned answer sheets and questions over the quality of images available through the system continued. A 19-year-old ethical hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, exposed critical security vulnerabilities in the evaluation platform, The Wire reported.
Coempt said Adhikary accessed only a public-facing test server. The company said the server contained dummy tests and held no student data.
To counter that claim, Adhikary demonstrated full Create, Read, Update, and Delete and shell access to live production servers, India Today said. The teenager published a screen recording that showed the "Bad Apple" animation running directly on a CBSE-linked production dashboard.
The hacker also exposed an unauthenticated Amazon Web Services storage bucket containing actual 2026 student answer sheets, The Hindu said. He found a hardcoded master password in the portal's public JavaScript code that bypassed two-factor authentication entirely.
Tender Modifications Revealed
The company also rejected allegations that tender conditions had been modified to accommodate substandard hardware, Business Standard said. CBSE awarded the On-Screen Marking contract to Coempt on Dec. 5, 2025, with an estimated value of ₹38.46 crore, as per the Hindustan Times. As of June 2026, the actual payable amount stood at ₹25.39 crore based on 9.86 million Class 12 scripts processed.
Tender modifications in August 2025 relaxed the scanning resolution from 300 to 200 DPI and dropped robotic scanning requirements, Business Standard said. A September 2025 corrigendum removed CBSE's power to blacklist Coempt for software failures, shifting penalties to project delays instead.
Coempt defended its hardware despite the changes.
"The scanners used by Coempt are standard, industry-grade models utilised across the sector. We upgrade our hardware year-on-year and the scanning resolution is perfect," the company told The Indian Express.
The company also cited the 2019 Telangana Intermediate examination controversy to defend its track record. Coempt said the matter had been examined by courts and that the Supreme Court had declined pleas seeking mass re-evaluation, compensation and criminal action against the technology provider.
Coempt currently provides examination-related services, including digitisation, on-screen marking, AI-assisted evaluation and question-paper management, to more than 35 universities and institutions across the country.
