A boy of his age normally logs into exam portals to download admit cards and check results. 16-year-old Malayali boy Rylen Anil did something more complex. He hacked into the NEET and JEE portals, spotted serious security issues and flagged the vulnerabilities.

The teen's smart move prompted authorities to fix the issues and also won praise from the National Testing Agency (NTA). For his parents, his action gave a real scare.

"He came and told me, in the typical way children speak, that he found serious issues in the NEET portal. I got scared. But despite his age, he is mature, so I trusted him. He explained the details and then mentioned the JEE portal. After seeing the NTA’s response, I was reassured. I did not have to intervene and he handled the situation well," his father, Anil Abraham, recalled.

Rylen credits his interest in ethical hacking to growing up around computers, thanks to his father's IT background and to movies which inspired him to explore the field further.

"My father comes from an IT background. I grew up around computers and servers, which definitely sparked my interest. Along with that, watching movies such as The Matrix, Terminator and Mr Robot deeply inspired me to pursue ethical hacking," Rylen said, looking around his room adorned with movie posters.

Rylen is the younger son of Anil, a native of Mannar in Thiruvalla and a general manager in IT infrastructure at a private firm in Dubai, and Swapna Cyril from Erumeli and a senior physiotherapist.

On May 31, the teenager discovered vulnerabilities on the NTA’s re-examination portal, put out a tweet, informed officials at CERT In and went to sleep. "NTA’s re-examination portal has a superadmin login bypass using extremely weak credentials. This exposes bulk user data: ~7.9k observers, 676 CCs, 5.4k CS/centres, including names, emails, and phone numbers," his X post read.

"I woke up the next day, went to school and came back to headlines saying I hacked the NTA portal. Fearing the stigma around the word 'hacking', my parents were worried. I then explained the matter to them and they were proud," Rylen said.

"Ethical hacking is when you identify security vulnerabilities by testing portals without any malicious intent," he explained. Rylen added that his interest was sparked further after connecting with Nisarga Adhikary, the 19-year-old who had previously exposed CBSE AWS buckets containing answer sheets and question papers.

"After that incident, I messaged him and he informed me about vulnerabilities on government portals. That led me to test and find issues with the NEET and JEE portals. We are now good friends," Rylen said.

Officials from the NTA later contacted him to thank him for finding the vulnerability. The portal was temporarily shut down and the issue fixed. Rylen then identified a vulnerability in the JEE Advanced 2026 portal, tweeting: "JEE Advanced 2026 candidate/result infrastructure had a public cloud storage misconfiguration exposing bulk candidate data without authentication. This exposed ~179.6k result records and ~187.3k admit-card PDFs, including candidate names, DOBs, and mobile numbers." Authorities have shut down the portal and are working on fixing the issue.

"Initially, my friends asked if I would go to jail. Once I explained it to them, they were happy. They said, ‘Finally, we have a popular friend in the group,'" Rylen said with a smile.

Rylen’s achievement didn’t just make headlines, it also brought joy to his family and friends, who were thrilled to see him in the news. "Our loved ones have been curious about what this is all about. Also, amid the ongoing controversies, when people search for why the portal is down, his news reports naturally appear," Anil said.

He added that Rylen taught himself all that he knows. "He learned everything by himself," he said. Rylen disagreed with a laugh: "Definitely not true. He played a huge role in nurturing my passion."