"The IRCTC has a registered user base of 4 crore people of which about 3 crore users are active on the site. Moreover, some 50 lakh new users get registered on IRCTC's website every year. We are confident that no data has been compromised in any which way," said an IRCTC official.
The investigations into the alleged hacking of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) and the subsequent theft of information of its registered users has reached a dead-end.
IRCTC officials told dna that with the Maharashtra police's cyber cell not sharing the data — which was purportedly captured by the hacker — the investigations are unable to go any further. It was the cyber cell that had alerted the railways and IRCTC about a possible intrusion into the IRCTC's ticketing network with an intention to capture data of registered users on the site.
On its part, Maharashtra police officials told this paper that it had done its job by providing confidential information about an alleged attempt on the website. Its officials refused to answer queries on whether they would be providing the data of the leaked information to the joint investigation team of IRCTC and the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).
"The IRCTC has a registered user base of 4 crore people of which about 3 crore users are active on the site. Moreover, some 50 lakh new users get registered on IRCTC's website every year. We are confident that no data has been compromised in any which way," said an IRCTC official.
The stalemate has now put in cold storage what was IRCTC's biggest technology scare since the commercial department and the Railway Protection Force unit of Central Railway found a large number of touts compromising the IRCTC's ticketing system by using speed software.
The railways had retrieved 4,782 tickets worth over Rs2 crore as part of that touting scam. The investigations by the railways at that time had revealed that touts were being able to circumvent the captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) in the IRCTC system. Touts were booking as many as 128 tickets per minute from a single computer.
In July last year, the Central Bureau of Investigation had come into the picture and had arrested an assistant manager of IRCTC for allegedly interfering with the IRCTC ticket booking system. The CBI's case was that this IRCTC official had installed a software programme (called New Trained Software) in the computers of several travel agents that allowed the latter to book 6 separate tickets per minute, that is 36 passengers per minute. This is six times the speed of what a normal commuter gets.
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