Chennai: A day after Deccan Chronicle reported the alleged data breach in which details of students who appeared for class-10 and plus-2 public exams in March 2018 put up for sale for educational institutions, school education department officials approached the city police commissioner A.K. Viswanathan and sought action against the perpetrators.
The news that broke out on Wednesday shook the education fraternity and the students who had appeared for the exam. The scam came to the light after parents and students have received an unusually high number of calls from private engineering colleges and coaching centres. The institutions are trying to lure them with various offers and gifts leaving many parents to wonder how they get access to their personal details such as phone numbers and plus 2 marks.
According to sources, the database of over eight lakh candidates who appeared for state board plus 2 exams this year was obtained illegally. Details including students name, address, date of birth, community name and phone number were stolen from the database.
In the meantime, an advertisement by a database provider has said that institutions can buy the details of students belonging to any of the 32 districts by paying between '2,000 and '5,000. Those details were collected by the Directorate of Government Examinations (DGE) from the districts for releasing the results through SMS.
When the department officials contacted the database provider, the company had removed the advertisement abruptly from their website. “They may not have the details of all the students. As of now, we do not know how they got the data,” one of the officials said.
Meanwhile, director of government examinations (DGE) Rama also submitted a report on the issue to the state government on Monday. Now, the officials are having a rethink about releasing the results through SMS as well. According to sources, the officials had sought police intervention to find out from where they obtained data and to take actions on the perpetrators.
