A report from Television channel IBN7 alleges that a daily 4-5 minute down-time 8am for the website for the Indian Railways and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), through with travelers book railway tickets, ensures that touts have exclusivity over emergency tickets. A sting operation conducted by the channel quotes an agent as saying that the they invest Rs 1 lakh a day on bookings, and that touts would use the downtime to book Tatkal tickets. Tatkal tickets are available as an emergency quota, for passengers needing to travel urgently, and are available only two days prior to departure. Typically these tickets get sold out quickly. This follows another report a couple of days ago, on India Today Online, which said that a gang was "hacking" into IRCTC servers and was generating 10-15 PNR numbers before 8am every morning. IRCTC facilitates the purchase of highest number of tickets online in India each month - in April 2012, it reported 12.95 million transactions, easily amounting to over $100 million. However, the website is known to have significant technical issues, and down time: we've even seen sarcastic tweets from people, celebrating having successfully booked a ticket. News reports have pointed out that Tatkal tickets have "vanished" after the site goes down. Our Take - The agents appear to be suggesting to IBN7 that the downtime is intentional, though not explicitly saying that. It's not clear whether the IRCTC downtime is orchestrated internally, or whether a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is executed every day…
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