Nisarga Adhikary, a 19 year old cybersecurity researcher, has been named in the United States Department of Justice's Hall of Fame after flagging a critical vulnerability in one of the department's major law enforcement systems, adding an American recognition to a résumé that first drew national attention closer to home over flaws in an Indian examination board's own portal.
According to Adhikary, he reported the vulnerability to the DoJ roughly a week before the recognition, and the department validated and patched the flaw shortly after, crediting him on its Hall of Fame page. He received no payment for the find, treating the acknowledgement itself as the reward for the work.
That was not his only brush with an American security agency this year. Adhikary also received a formal Thanks from the US Department of Defense through HackerOne, the platform commonly used by researchers to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities, after finding a flaw in a Department of Defense system. The department validated the report as legitimate, though remediation work on that issue was still underway at last report.
Adhikary first built his reputation closer to home earlier this year, when he uncovered a string of serious flaws in the Central Board of Secondary Education's Online Submission of Marks portal. His research found that the flaws could have let anyone with basic technical knowledge bypass OTP authentication, impersonate examiners, reset passwords, and even alter the marks recorded for students, a set of vulnerabilities he flagged to CERT-In, India's cybersecurity watchdog, in February.
The recognition has translated into a career step as well. Adhikary has since been hired as an Open Source Intelligence and threat intelligence engineer at C3iHub, the cybersecurity innovation hub run out of IIT Kanpur, putting his self-taught skill at finding flaws in critical systems to work within one of India's own technology institutions.