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Indian Railways Should Secure Data Before Monetising It IRCTC may or may not have already been hacked; the railways does because there are no compulsory disclosure laws in India, n’t should inform you about it. Indian Railways (IR) has other portals for ticket reservations, IRCTC is one of the more significant public-facing portals. Most of the railway portal sites are still running on protocols that are unsecured, they don’t use any sort of security certifications yet and http://pnrstatuscheckirctc.com/railway-reservation-explained for hackers easily. It is no secret that the railways has bugs in their portals, the infamous bug of being text that was captcha is obviously laughed around in quora and reddit threads. If you understand the Indian Railway Fan Club Association and are a railway buff, you would understand the way the moderators had to block folks posting data that is inner from Integrated Coaching Management System, an internal portal of the railways. OTAs (On-Line Journey Aggregators) exploit several security bugs and strike railway servers continuously, data mining thousands of data records. Some even decrypt encrypted content in violation of the IT Act. They're even monetizing real-time railway info against the limited permissions to make use of them. You can’t possess any railway property illegally according to the RAILWAYS PROPERTY (Unlawful Possession) Act 1966; it follows that railway info is its property too. At the moment information PNR status, like train standing, ticket availability would fall under the data that is public. But OTAs getting it using exploits in code make the data prohibited, irrespective of it being people already. These practices of OTAs could prove powerful at a time of calamity. When Estonia was assaulted it showed the world how impactful cyber warfare might be. Everything from banking to communications was hit. Every other authorities started reinforcing its IT infrastructure and started using exactly the same tactics as the NSA when Snowden made the revelations about the scale of NSA security snooping. The Chinese often use their great firewall for both censorship and assaults and aren't far behind the Americans. http://pnrstatuscheckirctc.com/irctc-station-code-and-name is critical infrastructure to the country, any weakness could be a significant danger. Recognizing that, IR came up with a Simple Security Policy. However a recent CAG report from http://pnrstatuscheckirctc.com/list-of-all-indian-railways-stations on IT infrastructure for crew management points out that almost 90-100% workers make use of exactly the same password, sidelining the system intended for function-based access management. Several contract workers are given exactly the same username and password defying the whole logic of the policy. At the same time there's no area for anyone to report security bugs to the officials, although the way railways is using Information Technology to reach individuals and assist them over social media is astonishing. Bug bounty software are frequently used by the business to address it’s security issues utilizing the expertise from hobbyists and professional security specialists. In the current budget year, Indian railways is spending 50 crores to finance inventions in the space of data, part of which focus on cyber security according to Mr. Suresh Prabhu. What the railways is forgetting to understand is this: buying a cyber security solution isn't planning to solve their issues. It's the culture in CRIS which must transform. The minister has been emphasizing on the significance of change in the 150-year old organization. If it means to tackle cyber security, it requires to enhance CRIS personal. Railways can set an example by building IT team that was skilled to help re and CRIS -innovate itself. The net moves really fast, today’s security is tomorrow’s susceptibility as well as the railways need to start adapting to it. Railways lately began adopting the National Data Sharing & Accessibility Policy (2012) to an extent; the chief data officer for railways has opened up a few of the train time tables (around 2800 trains) on Open Government Data Portal. The policy requires to classify datasets into private, public & limited data. It is high time railways begin releasing open data, open API’s improving its info practices by possibly adopting a bug bounty program and closing security loopholes of sensitive information. It truly is necessary for railways to secure it’s data before it tries to monetize it.