After reports of over 18,000 hacking attempts on its website, the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), which facilitates online railway ticket booking facility, has taken a slew of measures including a 35 seconds compulsory wait to book tickets online, difficult captchas for hassle-free booking by genuine ticket seekers and curb activities of touts.
IRCTC Chairman and Managing Director AK Manocha said that it is not possible to book ticket online before 35 seconds’ mandatory wait as it has been done to prevent faster booking by unscrupulous elements using any other means. “We have taken certain security measures to prevent manipulation of the ticketing site and at the same time the site has been upgraded with a substantial investment to enable the system to book 15,000 tickets per minute,” Manocha said at a Press briefing on the subject.
When countered about the 35 seconds time limit, Manocha said none can fill the form before the new time limit due to the difficult captcha. Manocha said even then they came to know about some automated script softwares available with the touts for faster bookings. “Thus to prevent that, very difficult captchas have now been introduced,” he said.
Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) MD Sanjay Das said 35 seconds is the minimum time required to fill the information necessary for booking ticket online. “We cannot make it any longer otherwise there will be a long queue which will again be counter-productive,” said Das. CRIS provides the software to IRCTC.
About the possibility of hacking the site to cause disruption in the service, Das said foolproof arrangements have been made to prevent any unauthorised intrusion or hacking of the site. The organisation has engaged Standardisation Ticketing and Quality Control, a website security audit expert, to check the system and they have certified that the site is safe.
“There have been about 18,500 attempts in the past to intrude into the system which can be called as denial of service attackers. We have taken necessary security measures to prevent such incidents,” Das said.
Online booking of train tickets has gone up to 58 per cent of the total tickets booked by railways. In order to facilitate the genuine passengers, Tatkal booking time has been staggered from 10 am to 11 am for AC classes and 11 am to 12 pm for non-AC classes.