India, May 27 -- Nisarga Adhikary doesn't fit the cliche of a shadowy hacker. For one, he's just 19 and has just given his board exams. A regular private school student with parents who are government officials, he began coding in the 7th grade. Curious about repeated student complaints around missing answer sheets and altered marks, Nisarga started examining Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE)newly launched On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal as a way to pass the time.

"I wanted to understand why it was in the news so much, so I started playing around with the website. The problems only showed up once I stopped looking at the page and started looking at the code behind it," said the teen, who is now fielding offers from AI startups...