Delhi High Court Directs Centre to Nominate Members for Deepfake Committee

Executive Summary:

A video has gone viral that claims to show Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah stating that the BJP-Led Central Government intends to end quotas for scheduled castes (SCs), scheduled tribes (STs), and other backward classes (OBCs). On further investigation, it turns out this claim is false as we found the original clip from an official source, while he delivered the speech at Telangana, Shah talked about falsehoods about religion-based reservations, with specific reference to Muslim reservations. It is a digitally altered video and thus the claim is false. 

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Claims:

The video which allegedly claims that the Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah will be terminating the reservation quota systems of scheduled castes (SCs), scheduled tribes (STs)  and other backward classes (OBCs) if BJP government was formed again has been viral on social media platforms. 

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English Translation: If the BJP government is formed again we will cancel ST, SC reservations: Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah

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Fact Check:

When the video was received we closely observed the name of the news media channel, and it was V6 News. We divided the video into keyframes and reverse searched the images. For one of the keyframes of the video, we found a similar video with the caption “Union Minister Amit Shah Comments Muslim Reservations | V6 Weekend Teenmaar” uploaded by the V6 News Telugu’s verified Youtube channel on April 23, 2023. Taking a cue from this, we also did some keyword searches to find any relevant sources. In the video at the timestamp of 2:38, Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah talks about religion-based reservations calling ‘unconstitutional Muslim Reservation’ and that the Government will remove it.

Further, he talks about the SC, ST, and OBC reservations having full rights for quota but not the Muslim reservation. 

While doing the reverse image, we found many other videos uploaded by other media outlets like ANI, Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, etc about ending Muslim reservations from Telangana state, but we found no such evidence that supports the viral claim of removing SC, ST, OBC quota system. After further analysis for any sign of alteration, we found that the viral video was edited while the original information is different. Hence, it’s misleading and false.

Conclusion:

The video featuring the Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah announcing that they will remove the reservation quota system of SC, ST and OBC if the new  BJP government is formed again in the ongoing Lok sabha election, is debunked.  After careful analysis, it was found that the video was fake and was created to misrepresent the actual statement of Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah. The original footage surfaced on the V6 News Telugu YouTube channel, in which Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah was explaining about religion-based reservations, particularly Muslim reservations in Telangana. Unfortunately, the fake video was false and Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah did not mention the end of SC, ST, and OBC reservations.

• Claim: The viral video covers the assertion of Hon'ble Minister of Home Affairs, Shri Amit Shah that the BJP government will soon remove reservation quotas for scheduled castes (SCs), scheduled tribes (STs), and other backward classes (OBCs).
• Claimed on:  X (formerly known as Twitter)
• Fact Check:  Fake & Misleading

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Introduction

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On June 2nd, 2026, even as thousands of Class 12 students across the nation flocked to submit re-evaluation and verification applications on the CBSE’s newly rolled-out On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal, a decidedly different kind of visitor had logged in an attacker carrying automation scripts, botnet traffic, and malicious intentions to either shut the system down or steal its contents. The attack, which CBSE then openly reported on its official X account, flooded the portal with 1.5 million hits in two minutes and sent over a lakh unauthorized file access attempts.

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Understanding the Attack Architecture: The Two-Pronged Operation

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The CBSE cyberattack was actually not a single exploit but rather a layered, orchestrated attack. The attack can be understood in two prongs:

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1. The DoS Attack:Firstly, attackers initiated a large-scale DoS (Denial of Service) attack, producing approximately 1.5 million requests in 120 seconds, or approximately 12,500 per second, in order to saturate the server. By overloading the systems with bogus requests, the attackers sought not just to disable the site but also to throw off security personnel from their primary task of stabilizing the portal during its launch period.

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The File Probing: These attacks usually include the following methods:

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1. Path Traversal Attacks - Attackers will attempt to navigate outside of the current directory by supplying inputs such as "../../etc/passwd" in URL parameters or in a file upload. 
2. Forced Browsing / Directory Enumeration - An attacker may have used tools to attempt to find vulnerable files and directories like answer sheets, exam scans, student identification documents, and admin-related files by systematically guessing names.
3. API Endpoint Fuzzing: If any REST or GraphQL API was present for the portal, the attacker may have tried sending a various number of inputs to parameters to attempt to retrieve records, find IDORs, or escalate privileges. 
4. Session Token Harvesting - For high-load environments, some systems may use insecure session management. Attackers would attempt to predict or guess the token to hijack another student's or administrator's session.

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Why Are Educational Portals High-Value Targets?

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Here's why the Indian education sector is an attractive target for cyber-attacks:

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1. Concentrated PII: Millions of students are present on these education portals, and their data (names, birth dates, Aadhaar linkage information, parents' details, address, education profiles, etc.) is of the highest value on the dark web and can be used for identity theft, financial fraud, credential reuse, and targeting.
2. Low Investment Relative to the Data Value: The education system is chronically under-invested in cybersecurity. Many of these systems were built for a function/scale, rather than security by design, and are highly vulnerable.
3. High-Pressure Launches: Launching a massive, public-facing system like the CBSE OSM verification site that needs to service millions of students on day 1 often requires time constraints that preclude proper penetration testing, stress testing, security auditing, or staged deployment; these launches often launch with numerous known security flaws.
4. Large Attack Surface: The education ecosystem is comprised of many integrated systems, APIs, cloud instances, third-party systems, and authentication infrastructure. Each dependency increases the overall attack surface and provides multiple potential avenues to compromise these systems, such as IDOR, API abuse, or credential-based attacks.
5. Geopolitical Motivation: Following the Op Sindoor attack in 2025, there was a significant increase in public institutions targeted by cyber-attacks with prolonged DDoS against critical systems. Highly visible, public-facing student portals catering to more than 35 million students make a tantalizing target for both nation-state attackers and hacktivist groups to cause disruption or gather intelligence.

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The CBSE's Response

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A balanced perspective on CBSE's public response is necessary:

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1. The portal did not go down and served about 14000 users at any point during the attack and had over 28000 successful submissions by 10pm June 2nd.
2. In real-time, sessions are continuously being optimized for the students, and session timeouts are being extended.
3. Management was on top of the situation and maintained good communication through social media.

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To withstand a sustained attack volume of roughly 12,500 requests per second, CBSE would surely need more than one security control implemented on its infrastructure. In all probability, rate limiting was the primary reason it could sustain this attack volume by limiting the requests from an IP or client over a certain period of time and automatically aborting requests from systems sending automated data. This, coupled with perhaps load balancing, will distribute the attack across several systems, none of which will have become bottlenecks. Finally, it is possible that traffic could have also been routed via a Content Delivery System (CDN) or dedicated DDoS mitigation service capable of detecting and cleaning requests of malicious code before they even reach the origin servers.

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Technical Recommendations

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It is not sustainable for India's exam infrastructure to continue operating in a post-breach, patching-in mode forever. The systems need to embrace Privacy By Design (PBD) as an integral part of their DNA. Here are suggestions for short-term hardening and long-term resilience:

1. Deploy a zero-trust file access architecture: Each request to access any file should be authenticated, authorized using role-based access control (RBAC), and logged in an immutable audit trail. Direct access to file paths should not be permissible; rather, pre-signed, time-limited tokens are recommended to control file access.
2. Implement a multi-layered DDoS mitigation architecture: A combination of network edge traffic scrubbing (CDNs & DDoS mitigation services) along with rate limiting at the application layer via WAF is necessary. An Anycast-based multi-PoP architecture and pre-provisioning scrubbing capacity may further increase resiliency
3. Conduct pre-launch penetration testing and red teaming exercises: Penetration testing with OWASP Top 10 audits, API security reviews, and load-based penetration testing should be conducted by CERT-In empanelled auditors prior to the launch of the examination. The red team exercise should simulate blended DoS and file-probing attacks.
4. Secure Payments: The secure payment surface should support PCI-DSS Level 1 certified payments and tokenisation and employ velocity checks against automated abuse and support 3D Secure 2.0 (3DS2) on card payments.
5. Implement SOC: Security operations centers (SOCs) should have real-time access to CERT-In threat feeds and ISAC intelligence, allowing them to act quickly on emerging attack vectors before anything malicious can be exploited.
6. Encryption: Students' data should be encrypted with AES-256; keys should be stored separately in a Hardware Security Module (HSM) system and not co-located with the data storage system. Student data must also support the data minimisation principle, while storing it should be encrypted with AES-256 and keys should be stored securely in HSM.
7. Monitoring: 24/7 SOC monitoring, ongoing vulnerability scanning on all pipelines, anomalous detection baselining, and frequent tabletop exercises for cyber resilience at 24x7 and post-examination activities.

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Beyond the Breach: Governance, Accountability, and the Growing Cyber Threat to India's Education Sector

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The CBSE attack is merely one example of a wider truth, a truth that extends beyond an isolated security event and highlights security as not only an issue of governance but of national security. Although it was during a period in which there was considerable change in leadership within the CBSE (some officials had been removed from their positions), and although it may be impossible to prevent administrative change, security vulnerability is an inherent risk when it cannot be ensured that the new incumbents have had knowledge transferred from the previous administration in terms of system design, vendor management, configuration, and incident response procedures. It has become apparent that a requirement for digital system governance must be considered to be just as serious a requirement as an academic and administrative governance requirement.

The attack is also indicative of a wider problem, and in 2025 there were in excess of 265 million cyber-attacks, and increasingly, critical infrastructure is being attacked by all manner of actors, including criminals, hacktivists, and state-sponsored groups. Educational institutions offer a prime target due to the amount of personal data held within their systems and the historically low security investment they tend to have. Worldwide trends that support the similar narrative of "data of immense value protected by under-resourced programs" (universities hit by ransomware and mass student data breaches included) are being constantly illustrated. For an examining body of tens of millions of students, cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought and needs to be clearly addressed within the governance and risk-management framework of the institution and, therefore, become a fundamental pillar of public trust.

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Conclusion

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The June 2026 cyberattack on the CBSE's OSM portal both illustrated the advancing capabilities of today's threat actors and highlighted the critical role cyber resilience must play in India's education sector. A high-volume DoS attack combined with over 100,000 file access attempts indicates a concerted and strategic operation both for disruption and the opportunity for data theft. Though the CBSE's infrastructure did hold, the attack should not offer comfort. Educational institutions are responsible for a significant amount of sensitive personal data, and they are major targets to state-sponsored and financially motivated attackers. Attacks are bound to continue. It is essential that cybersecurity become a fundamental pillar of the governance and trustworthiness of education and not a technical afterthought.

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References

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1. CBSE Official Statement on Cyberattack, X (formerly Twitter), @cbseindia29, June 2, 2026.
2. Indian Express, "CBSE OSM Row: Portal attack was a 'coordinated, two-pronged operation' says cybersecurity expert," June 3, 2026.
3. Srinivas L, Joint MD & Joint CEO, 63SATS Cybertech (subsidiary of 63 moons technologies limited), was quoted in Indian Express, June 3, 2026.
4. The Federal, "CBSE re-evaluation portal faces cyberattack, records 1.5 million hits in two minutes," June 2, 2026. https://thefederal.com
5. CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team), Empanelled Security Auditor Framework. https://www.cert-in.org.in
6. OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks, 2021 edition. https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/
7. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Zero Trust Architecture (SP 800-207), August 2020. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-207
8. Indian Express, "What CBSE ignored: Its own panel found glitches in dry run, said delay OSM by a year," June 3, 2026.
9. Asianet Newsable, "CBSE Class 12 re-evaluation portal withstands major DoS cyberattack," June 2, 2026. https://newsable.asianetnews.com

Introduction

The land of the dragon has been significantly advanced in terms of innovation and creating self-sustaining technologies of civic and military importance. Leading nations of the West still need to understand the advancements the dragon land has made in technologies and what potential threats it poses on an international level.

Int on Dragon Land

According to a leaked US intelligence study, China is developing powerful cyber weapons to “seize control” of adversary satellites and render them worthless for data communications or surveillance during combat.

According to the US, China’s effort to build up the capacity to “deny, exploit, or hijack” hostile satellites is critical to controlling information, which Beijing views as a crucial “war-fighting domain.”^[1]

The CIA-marked document, one of hundreds purportedly given by a 21-year-old US Air Guardsman in the most influential American intelligence leaks in over a decade, was released this year and has yet to be disclosed before.

This kind of cyber capabilities would be significantly superior to what Russia has used in Ukraine, where electronic warfare troops have used a brute-force strategy to little avail.

How were the capabilities discovered?

According to a top-secret US dossier, China could use its cyber capabilities to “take control of a satellite, making it inoperable for support of communications, weapons, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.” The US has never acknowledged having a comparable or superior capability.

By broadcasting related frequencies from truck-mounted jamming systems like the Tirada-2, these attacks were first developed in the 1980s to block communications between low-orbit SpaceX satellites and their on-ground terminals. China’s more ambitious cyberattacks are designed to imitate the signals that adversary satellites’ operators send out, tricking them into malfunctioning or being entirely taken over at critical points in a battle.

Implications of such military capabilities

The south Chinese island nation of Taiwan is attempting to develop a communications infrastructure that can withstand an attack from China after observing how crucial satellite communications have been to the Ukrainian military.

According to a January 2023 article in the Financial Times, it is seeking investors to launch its own satellite provider while testing with 700 non-geostationary satellite receivers around Taiwan to ensure bandwidth in the case of conflict or natural calamities. Similarly, a Russian cyber strike rendered thousands of Ukrainian military routers from US-based Viasat inoperable in the hours before it launched its invasion last year, demonstrating how important satellite communications have become in contemporary wartime. This attack was deemed to be catastrophic by the Ukraine officials as it broke down the communication between the Ukraine army and the govt.

Additionally, several hundred wind turbines in Germany, Poland, and Italy were impacted, which cut off service to thousands of Viasat users in those countries. Even though it was complex, the Viasat hack required accessing the business’ computer systems and then sending commands to the modems that made them break.

How significant is the threat?

According to the leaked assessment, China’s objectives are much more sophisticated and focused towards the future. According to analysts, they would aim to disable satellites’ ability to interact with one another, relay signals and orders to weapons systems, or give back visual and intercepted electronic data. Satellites often work in interconnected clusters and remain unmanned, thus preventing the scope of proper surveillance. Officials from the US military have warned that China has made substantial advancements in creating military space technologies, particularly satellite communications. Beijing is vigorously pursuing counter-space capabilities in an effort to realise its “space dream” of being the dominant force outside of the Earth’s atmosphere by 2045.

Threat to India?

As China aggressively invests in technology meant to disrupt, degrade, and destroy our space capabilities, a potential threat remains on the Indian satellites and spaceships. The complexity of the communication network and extended distance from the Earth can point towards a high number of vulnerabilities for the Indian Space program. Still, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has been working tirelessly, and as of 1st January 2022, India has 21 operational satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and 28 operational satellites in Geostationary Orbit. In 2021, ISRO launched one PSLV-DL variant (PSLV-C51) mission and one GSLV-MkII variant (GSLV-F10) mission. GSLV-F10 could not accomplish the mission successfully. In 2021, India placed five satellites and 1 PSLV rocket body (PS4 stage) in Low Earth Orbits. India placed 65 rocket bodies in orbit from the first launch, of which 42 are still in orbit around the Earth, and 23 have re-entered and burnt up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The break-up event of the 4th stage of PSLV-C3 in 2001 generated 386 debris, of which 76 are still in orbit.

Conclusion

The space race is the new cold war, all nations are working towards securing their space assets while exploring new elements in outer space. It is pertinent that the national interest in space is protected, and a long awaiting space treaty for the modern age needs to be ratified by all nations with a presence in space. The future of space exploration is bright for most nations, but the threats should be eradicated, and an all-inclusive space should be promoted to maintain harmony in space.

^[1] https://www.ft.com/content/fc72d277-7fa8-4b29-9231-4feb34f43b0c