IIT KGP student’s ‘panga na le’ moment with IRCTC

According to a public survey by NDTV, the toughest thing to do is to book a train ticket on the IRCTC website – harder than getting rid of corruption in India and certainly much harder than clearing the IIT JEE exam. Rakesh Kapur, a final year Computer Science student at IIT Kharagpur, is not the one to be turned down so easily. With his links to the international hackers’ group ‘Hacktivist’ and being a self-proclaimed expert at website attacks on ‘Denial of Service’, he hacked the IRCTC portal and booked the ticket he needed – from Kharagpur to Mumbai.

Rakesh claims, “After 782 failed attempts to book the tickets on the IRCTC website the usual way, I decided to use my programming skills to hack the website and get the deed done. For a while, I had listed the entire process on my blog hackandbookquick.blogspot.com that is a foolproof and swift way to achieve the ‘undoable’ but had to take it down due to legal reasons.”

Surprisingly, the IRCTC Technical Division Chief Sukhdhir Singh is not embarrassed or shocked by what has happened. In fact, he is thrilled to know that there is a way to book tickets quickly. He said, “The real embarrassment is not that this bright IITian put us down but that at times, our own staff are not able to book tickets on the portal. We would like to look closely at Rakesh’s hack and see if it can be deployed for regular ticket-booking process.”

Meanwhile, the Special Task Force (STF) officials in Lucknow have arrested Salman who admitted that a gang in Uttar Pradesh have been hacking the IRCTC website for a last couple of years to buy Tatkal tickets. The gang used the software called Triple-X which had been developed by IT professional Kuldeep Singh who is based in Ahmedabad. The CD of the software could generate 10 to 15 PNR numbers before 8 am every morning – which used to get confirmed when the IRCTC ticket booking actually started.

We just wish that Rakesh was a real IITian who could hack his way up the IRCTC ticket booking process and Sukhdhir was a real open-minded Technical Head who would use the process to make the portal better.