NEW DELHI: As many as 820 students are said to have benefitted from the hacking by Russian national Mikhail Shargin of the iLeon software platform, the CBI told a Delhi court on Tuesday.
Shargin, 25, was arrested at IGI Airport late Monday night. Following his production in court, Shargin, who was described as a “professional hacker”, was remanded to two-day CBI custody.
The students who took advantage of the hacking, which aided them to cheat in last year’s JEE (Mains) exam, is now suspected to be more than the number earlier estimated, the CBI said to have found in the course of its interrogation of Shargin who was detained by sleuths after he alighted from a plane from Almaty.
When Shargin told the court that the CBI could access his electronic devices in his presence, the agency sought the court’s direction for the Russian national to share his usernames and passwords. The CBI is not ruling out the possibility of other foreign nationals being involved in the hacking.
The JEE(Mains) is taken by aspirants seeking admission into top engineering colleges, including the IITs. Sources said “teachers” and “coaches” outside test centres were able to take charge of aspirants’ computers and solve questions.