The irctc.co.in site - the official railway ticket booking site of India belonging to Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has never been hacked, and there is very less chance of anyone attempting to do so. This might sound strange to you.

In a country like India where due to abundance of talented IT and programming talent, the claim that no one will even attempt to hack IRCTC doesn't seem right.

Especially when there are great benefits of doing so.

don't hack IRCTC


Of course new programmers do get excited and try and hack a website. After all what it requires is some good and intelligent programming. Although there are no known hacks, some well known hackers might be considering making an autobot that will just require to fill in captcha at the time of ticket booking. Basically on one single click the bot will automatically try to book Tatkal ticket at 10 am and will prompt you only for captcha. Captcha can also be bypassed though. No one has yet created such a hack. However tools that speed up ticket booking process are popular among the masses. IRCTC autofill (or magic autofill) is one such tool.

Imagine how much money can you make by taking control of  e ticketing website.  You can book all the tickets in advance and then sell them for whatever profit you want to make. But still, even when such mouthwatering "become rich quickly" opportunity is available, no one will do it. No one will hack IRCTC. People will go on attempting hacking facebook (600000 times everyday as per telegraph), but not www.irctc.co.in. And this is not due to some strict cyber law or punishment for cyber crime. There are some other strange reasons. You will find about it later in this article.

What could be the reason for such a claim? How can we so confidently state that hacking IRCTC website will never be considered?

The following points will make it clear:

  • The site is known for such a painstaking response that even the hackers are scared of it.
  • There is a huge question mark on the availability of site. Will the servers be up and running for someone to hack the website!
  • What will one gain by hacking IRCTC? Who would want to know about late train schedules, unconfirmed seats, wrong information and other worthless info. We all know hacking of outdated systems(those using dot matrix printer for printing and black white CRT monitors) have lately vanished. Although IRCTC next generation system is vastly improved and may attract new hackers.
  • One hacker claims that - "You don't need hackers for IRCTC. The server faces a DoS attack whenever more than one person tries to access the server simultaneously."

Now one thing we want to make clear is that this article is not to defame IRCTC. In fact we love the service.  You can check yourself that this whole website is all about IRCTC and railways. So no question of questioning the quality of service they offer.

IRCTC has also launched smartphone apps. Some of these railway apps, like IRCTC connect for android phones, have a fast response time. Yes, the response time also depends upon your internet connectivity speed, but the way app is designed and structured has made access to irctc login page faster than before. This is god send opportunity to hackers. May be the hackers could consider hacking the IRCTC android app. 

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