Alert:Booking and Cancellation for the Delhi Node will not be available

Booking and cancellation for the Delhi node will not be available from 00:20 hrs to 01:15 hrs of 12/03/2018 due to maintenance activity. Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted.

Source:IRCTC

ONLINE BOOKING SERVICE CHARGES WAIVED TILL 31ST MARCH 2017

In order to help passengers and incentivise online payments, IRCTC Service charge has been waived off on booking of E-tickets and I-tickets from 23rd Nov 2016 to 31st Mar 2017.

Source:IRCTC

Booking of Extended Servies Of Trains -Central Railway

2016/7/25

30-07-2016

Extension of AC Superfast Special Trains between Lokmanya Tilak Terminus-Lucknow, Nagpur-Pune and Nagpur-Amritsar. Bookings on special charges open from 1.8.2016

Central Railway Press Release

EXTENSION OF AC SUPERFAST SPECIALS BETWEEN LOKMANYA TILAK TERMINUS – LUCKNOW & NAGPUR – AMRITSAR / PUNE

Central Railway has decided to extend the run of following weekly AC Superfast special trains on the same timings & halts to clear the extra rush of passengers during summer rush. The details are as under:-

(A) Lokmanya Tilak Terminus-Lucknow AC Superfast Weekly Specials (6)

02107 special will leave Lokmanya Tilak Terminus at 14.20 hrs on every Saturday from 6.8.2016 to 20.8.2016 (3 trips) and arrive Lucknow at 13.45 hrs next day.

02108 special will leave Lucknow at 16.20 hrs on every Sunday from 7.8.2016 to 21.8.2016 (3 trips) and arrive Lokmanya Tilak Terminus at 17.30 hrs next day.

Halts: Thane, Kalyan, Nasik Road, Jalgaon, Bhusaval, Habibganj, Jhansi, Orai, Kanpur

Composition: One First AC, one First AC cum AC-2 Tier, 11 AC-3 Tier, 4 AC-2 Tier & one AC Pantry Car

(B) Nagpur – Amritsar AC Superfast Weekly Specials (6)

02125 AC Superfast special will leave Nagpur at 17.50 hrs on every Saturday from 6.8.2016 to 20.8.2016 (3 trips and arrive Amritsar at 21.05 hrs on next day.

02126 AC Superfast special will leave Amritsar at 04.20 hrs on every Monday from 8.8.2016 to 22.8.2016 (3 trips and arrive Nagpur at 04.25 hrs next day.

Halts: Bhopal, Jhansi, Gwalior, Agra Cantonment, New Delhi, Ambala Cantonment., Ludhiana and Jalandhar City.

Composition :One First AC, Four AC-2 Tier, Nine AC-3 Tier

(C) Nagpur – Pune AC Weekly Specials (4)

02124 special will leave Nagpur at 19.50 hrs on every Tuesday from 09.8.2016 and 16.8.2016 (2 trips) and arrive Pune at 11.45 hrs on next day.

02123 special will leave Pune at 1515 hrs on every Wednesday from 10.8.2016 and 17.8.2016 (2 trips) and arrive Nagpur at 05.15 hrs next day.

Halts: Wardha, Dhamangaon, Badnera, Akola, Bhusaval, Manmad, Kopargaon, and Daund.

Composition:  One First AC, Four AC-2 Tier, Nine AC-3 Tier

RESERVATION: Bookings for extended services of Train No. 02107, 02125, 02123 & 02124 Superfast Special trains on Special Charges will open from 1.8.2016

Source:Central Railway

IRCTC must gear up for targeted attacks; warn Experts, post Server Hack 

Hyderabad: As soon as the news of hacking of IRCTC site spread like wildfire in social media today, several users of the country’s biggest online transaction site have begun to pour in their concerns. They are worried about their card data that might have been compromised.

People, who have been tracking online frauds feel, that this is something that is waiting to happen. They feel that safety and security of a site must be directly proportionate to the importance of the data that it handles.

“Organisations in India are remarkably vulnerable to advanced cyber-attacks. They are significantly under-prepared in this area.

“We consistently encounter organisations here operating under the misguided assumption that antivirus and firewalls will keep you safe,” Vivek Chudgar, Senior Director (Asia-Pacific) of Mandiant, an arm of online security solutions firm Fire Eye, has said.

“They (firewalls and anti-virus solutions) are practically useless against advanced attacks,” he felt.

When an attack like this happens, organisations must do a proper forensic investigation with advanced tools to assess the extent of the overall damage done.

Tarun Kaura, (Director-Solution Product Management, Asia Pacific Japan) of global security solutions firm Symantec, said the attack indicates the growing trend of targeted attacks on organisations of all sizes.

He points out that websites are the gateways to a company’s network. “There were over one million web attacks globally against end-users each and every day in 2015. Websites are a critical element in major attacks. They are a way into a company’s network, they are a way into your data, and they are a way to reach their customers and partners,” he cautions.

Hacking of IRCTC site damaging

The inspector general (IG) of the Western Railway’s Railway Police Force (RPF), Uday Kumar, has said that the Indian Railway Catering Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website for train booking, is not as well-equipped as it was thought to be.

The IRCTC has been refusing to accept that a number of software have cropped up in the market, which allow users to bypass the regular booking process by a few seconds and land themselves a confirmed berth.

Mr Kumar said that the financial damage caused by the hacking of the website via these software has been small but consistent. He also said they are yet to find a way to stop it.

“The point is that the IRCTC website probably doesn’t have strong enough firewalls or sophisticated enough tools to stop the use of these software on its website, but they are working on it,” said Mr Kumar.

The RPF has been tracking such cases since 2014, when the now infamous racket of virtual touting from out of Ahmedabad had allowed the perpetrator earn `2.5 crore.

Another illegal practice that has been going on involves some of the appointed agencies by the IRCTC using the access to the servers as way to book confirmed tickets for exorbitant prices from passengers.

“These agencies that are actually supposed to facilitate booking of tickets for those who don’t have access and are given a quota from the IRCTC for the same have been using this to earn money from commuters, to confirm the ticket,” further added Mr Kumar.

Even though these practices have been going on for over two years now, the IRCTC and the RPF are yet to draw out a plan to curb this menace.

Railways launches e-Booking System for Journalists

New Delhi: Indian Railways give concession in fare for bonafide press work, to mediapersons accredited to the Press Information Bureau and other competent authorities.

Journalists now need not go to counters for booking train tickets as the Indian Railways on Tuesday launched e-booking for scribes on concessional passes available to them.

“It was promised in the budget to provide e-booking facility to journalists and today we fulfilled it,” Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said here on Tuesday after launching the facility for accredited scribes. Journalists were earlier required to book ticket on concessional passes at PRS counters.

In order to avail the benefit of the e-booking facility, journalists have to use their registered ID card number issued by Railways to book tickets.

IRCTC says New Servers reduce eTicketing Downtime by 15 Minutes

New Delhi: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a subsidiary of the Indian Railways announced that it has extended the time for e-ticket booking on its portal by 15 minutes – till 11:45pm.

IRCTC said that it had recently imported five new HP Itanium servers from Singapore to speed up e-ticketing operations on its digital platform.

Earlier this year, IRCTC had provisioned two Linux servers, substantially raising the booking capacity of e-tickets.

With the introduction of the new system on September 20, IRCTC’s main server will be closed for 45 minutes only, IRCTC said in an emailed statement.

Before the introduction of the new timing, passengers were allowed to book tickets through e-ticketing till 11:30pm, following which IRCTC would shut down its main server for an hour every day – from 11:30pm to 12:30am – for maintenance.

“The introduction of these new high-speed servers has substantially enhanced the website performance, including log-in time and payment gateway, which is why passengers are getting 15 more minutes for e-ticketing service,” said Dr. A K Manocha, Chairman and Managing Director, IRCTC.

The extended time period will also be available to passengers on the ‘current counters’ at railway stations, where tickets can be booked and cancelled.

IRCTC claims that it has 30 million registered users on the website, and is the world’s second busiest, with around 550,000 to 600,000 bookings everyday.

IRCTC examining the Proposal to make Aadhaar mandatory for Users’ Registration

New Delhi: The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is planning to make Aadhaar card mandatory for its user registration process for e-ticketing. This will ensure that users registering on the IRCTC web site are properly identified of their identity and address through the Aadhaar card number verification.

In a related move, IRCTC has decided to ramp up its e-ticketing operations by hiring the services of Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) for conducting the Security Audit of its Next Generation E-Ticketing System. As part of this, STQC will conduct the web application security and vulnerability assessment of servers and devices that are part of its e-ticketing operations on the hosted servers of www.irctc.co.in. The STQC Directorate is an attached office of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

New ID cards for Physically Challenged Persons: Online Reservations for Railway Tickets

Plans are on to launch a new scheme under which physically-challenged persons will be given new identity cards. With these cards, they can now reserve railway tickets online. Physically-challenged persons must get in tough with the zonal manager office’s commercial department for the new identity cards.

Along with the filled and signed application, the applicant must submit photocopies of the following documents – railway concession certificate, physically handicapped identity card, birth certificate, and any one of the ten documents accepted as proof of residence, including voter’s identity card and family ration card. Also required are two passport-sized photographs. New identity cards will be issued to physically-challenged candidates on submission of the application.

With this card, they can now reserve railway tickets online. On submission of a photocopy of the card at the ticket counter, they can obtain tickets for the travel.

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