IRCTC, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways, on Thursday denied reports that its website has been hacked. “I would like to assure you that our (IRCTC) website has not been hacked as claimed by some reports. However, we are looking into the matter of user data theft,” Sandip Dutta, the Public Relations Officer of IRCTC told FE Online.
According to some reports, personal data of around 1 crore customers is feared to have been stolen from the server of the e-ticketing portal. This has raised fears of safety and security, especially given the fact that customers provide details like PAN Card numbers while filling up online reservation forms.
Dutta told FE Online, “A high-level committee has been formed on the matter of data theft. This committe comprises three members of IRCTC and three members of CRIS, that is Centre for Railway Information.” “Only after we are able to understand the nature of the data that is said to have been stolen, will we be able to verify whether the data has been stolen from IRCTC or not,” Dutta added.
Internet ticketing on IRCTC website was started in year 2002 with 29 tickets on the first day. This has now increased to many lakh tickets booked in a single day.
IRCTC in 2014 introduced the next generation e-ticketing system (NGeT) to handle increased ticket booking. The capacity of NGeT was increased to 15000 tickets in a minute in 2015 to assist in faster and easier booking of tickets. Capacity in NGeT was increased by doubling the servers in integration layer and adding storage space.