2026

The National Cyber Suraksha Olympiad, or NCSO, is India’s First National Cyber Olympiad for school students. It is part of Hashtag Suraksha, a joint initiative of CERT-In and Cyber Buddha, and it exists for a straightforward reason. Almost everything students do now happens online, and knowing how to handle that well has become a skill in its own right. The NCSO is where that skill gets tested at a national level.
It runs over three rounds, and you compete within your own grade throughout, so a Grade 7 student is never measured against a Grade 12 student. The first round is the Qualifier, open to everyone who registers. Clear it and you earn the title of Cyber Cadet and go on to represent one of six zones, North, South, East, West, Central or North-East, in the Zonal Round. Clear that and you become a Cyber Defender and reach the Nationals, where the title of Cybernaut is decided.
The questions are not about memorising definitions. They put you in situations you could genuinely meet online, a message that is not what it seems, a password decision, a privacy setting, a claim that may or may not be true, and ask what you would do. Along the way there are certificates, badges, medals, trophies and cash prizes, and at the very top, the title of Cybernaut.

Any student studying in Grades 7 to 12 at a recognised Indian school board can take part. There is no entrance test, no minimum marks, and no requirement to have studied computers or cybersecurity before. If you are in one of those six grades, you are eligible.
Registration is individual. Each student registers for themselves, under their own grade, with their own account. Schools cannot register a batch of students together, and a teacher or coordinator cannot enroll a class on anyone’s behalf. This is so that every entry belongs to the student who will actually sit the rounds, and so that your progress, your titles and your certificates are yours.
You compete only against students in your own grade, so you are always being measured against your own year, never against someone five years ahead of you.

All of it is on CASK and it is free.
CASK stands for Cyber Abhyas Sakriya Kshamata. It is the learning platform built for Hashtag Suraksha, and it holds the entire syllabus the Olympiad draws from. The content is written by India’s cyber experts, grade by grade, so what you see when you log in is the material for your grade and nobody else’s. It is written for students, not for professionals, which means no technical jargon and no assumption that you have studied any of this before. The same material is offered in several different ways, because not everyone learns the same way. There is a textbook for the full picture of a topic, and simplified notes for when you are short on time. There are mind maps that lay a big idea out visually, and whiteboard lessons that give you the key points the way a teacher would write them on the board. There are comics that turn a chapter into a story, and practice quizzes to check yourself. Fix It Lab, Scenario, Cyber Detective and Situation Management each put you inside a situation and ask you to work it out rather than recall it. If you get stuck, Doubt Mate answers questions whenever you ask, and the AI Super Tutor shapes the whole thing around how you are actually learning.
You do not need anything else. There is no prescribed book to buy and no coaching to join. Register on CASK, open your grade, and everything the Olympiad will ask you about is there.

Registration for the Olympiad opens on 31st October and closes on 30th November. The Qualifier, the first round, is on 5th December.
So the longest run-up available to you is from the day you register until 5th December. Register in the first week and that is about five weeks. Register close to the deadline and it is a matter of days.
Nothing stops you from starting on CASK before you register, and nothing requires you to finish your entire grade’s syllabus before the Qualifier. But the later rounds come quickly, the Zonal Round on 12th December and the Nationals on 19th December, so the time you put in before the Qualifier is what carries you through the rest.

The Olympiad is conducted online, on CASK itself. You prepare on the same platform you compete on, so by the time you sit the Qualifier, the screen in front of you is already familiar.
There are three rounds, a week apart. The Qualifier is on 5th December and is open to every registered student. The Zonal Round is on 12th December, for the students who clear the Qualifier, and it is contested within your zone. The Nationals are on 19th December, between the students who come through the Zonal Round, and that is where the title of Cybernaut is decided.
Each round is sat within your own grade, and you move to the next round only by clearing the one before it. You use the same CASK login throughout, so there is no separate exam portal to set up and no second account to remember.

You can take the Olympiad in your own language.
CASK is available in 11+ Indian languages, and because the Olympiad is conducted on CASK, the language you learn in is the language you compete in. You choose it, and you read the questions in the language you actually think in.
This matters more than it may sound. In a timed round, understanding a question straight away, without translating it in your head first, is a real advantage. No part of the Olympiad should be spent working out what is being asked. So if you are more comfortable in Marathi or Tamil or Bengali than in English, that is not a disadvantage and your mother tongue is not the lesser option. It is simply the one that lets you show what you actually know.

The topics depend on your grade. Each grade from 7 to 12 has its own syllabus on CASK, and the Olympiad asks only what is covered in your grade.
They are built that way deliberately. What a student in Grade 7 runs into online is not what a student in Grade 12 runs into, and the two do not understand things at the same level. So the experts who wrote the curriculum looked at each grade separately: what you are able to grasp at that age, and what you are likely to be dealing with right now. Broadly, the earlier grades cover ground such as your digital footprint, how the internet actually works, strangers online, passwords and cyberbullying, while the later grades move into AI and deepfakes, your data rights, the law, and what to do when something has already gone wrong.
The reliable answer is always the one on the platform. Open CASK, go to your grade, and the chapters you see there are the syllabus the Olympiad draws from.

Yes, and there is more to it than a single certificate. Everyone who sits the Qualifier receives a nationally recognised participation certificate. You do not have to clear anything to earn it. Completing the round is enough.
After that, the certificates follow the titles, and each one is harder to earn than the last. Clear the Qualifier and you are a Cyber Cadet, one of only 900 students in the country, with the certificate and the badge to show for it. Clear the Zonal Round and you are a Cyber Defender, one of 60 in your grade in across India. Finish in the top ten at the Nationals and you are a Cybernaut, the title the whole Olympiad is built around while the top 3 per grade earn the Champions title.
These are not ordinary school certificates. They are national recognition, issued under an initiative of CERT-In, India's national agency for cybersecurity, under the aegis of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in collaboration with Cyber Buddha, and they say something specific about you: that you were tested on a skill the country has decided matters, against students from every corner of India, and you held your own.

Learning is free. Competing has a fee. CASK costs nothing. Every textbook, note, mind map, comic, quiz and tutor on it is free for every student in every grade, and that is deliberate. The purpose of Hashtag Suraksha is that this knowledge reaches every child in the country, whatever their school and whatever their circumstances, so nothing about learning it sits behind a payment.
The Olympiad is a separate thing. Registering for it costs ₹250 plus GST at 18 per cent, which comes to ₹295. It is a one-time fee and it covers all three rounds, the Qualifier, the Zonal Round and the Nationals. There is nothing further to pay at any stage, whether you go out in the first round or go all the way to the Nationals.
So you can learn everything on CASK without paying anything at all. The ₹295 applies only if you want to enter the competition.

Write to [email protected].
That is the address for anything to do with the Olympiad: trouble while registering, a payment that has not gone through, difficulty logging in to CASK, a question about your grade or your zone, or something that goes wrong during a round. Include the name you registered under and your grade, and describe what happened and when, so the team can find your account and answer properly rather than writing back to ask.
If something goes wrong on the day of a round, write as soon as you can rather than waiting for the round to finish.