Indian Railways suffers unspecified security 'breaches in various IT applications' Indian Railways has revealed it has suffered "a number of incidents... regarding breaches in various IT applications" and appears to have blamed some of them on sloppy infosec practices among staff working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The organisation's document [PDF] announcing the cyber-transgressions says "a …
Implications for normal people are likely to be
- non-financial data: name, age, train travel history, phone number, email address
- financial data: minimal or not at all (IMO)
It's been ages since I booked a ticket on IRCTC, but purchases in India are almost never of the "merchant knows your credit card number and has to keep it safe" type. Most people use "Net Banking", where the merchant does not know anything. It's somewhat like how the initial authentication flow of OAuth works -- you get directed from the merchant to your bank, you login there, accept the payment, and you are then sent back to the merchant, except in this case the merchant does not even know your account number in the bank, though he does know *which* bank you went to.
it's become a REAL plague since IR outsourced most of their backend operations to highly dubious, shady entrepreneurs which, according to media, operate with impunity, from the maze of backstreets of central London, Lancaster or Llandudno where, apparently, ANYTHING goes and where they pay the locals as little as 15 gbp per hour!!!!! The other day I tried to complain to an IR bot calling himself "Rahul" (yeah, right, more like Bob or Peter!), but all he was able to produce was some gibberish like our programme is founded on a robust evidence base and evaluation strategy, its projects are developed through co-design with communities and delivered through a service improvement methodology therefore we anticipate that most interventions worked on will have been resolved within a period of one year—after which successful solutions will be mainstreamed into the work of the trusts and spread nationally. This will ensure long-term sustainability of equality and diversity into our core business (...). Soon after this "chat" I found my bank account suddenly10000 Rps short! It is disgraceful that our government allows this daylight robbery to go on, this outrage must stop!!!
And there I was thinking it was about time Indian Railways outsourced and offshored their IT support to improve efficiency and lower support costs. But according to your post, they have already done so - but without leveraging any synergies or cloud enablement migration policies. Maybe their outsourcing company needs to have a good look at the process and offshore it again to somewhere else.
I can heartily recommend a long distance trip on a shatabdi (express). For every seat row in an AC (air conditioned or first class) carriage, British Rail would cram two rows into one of their coaches. And the food is a lot better too; not that BR food takes that much beating. The person in front can recline their seat all the way back without impinging on your space and the seats have this neat parallelogram affair that means as the seat in front of you is reclined, your fold-down table stays in the same relative space. Of course there's a downside... just try not to use the 'Weestern Tolit' if you can avoid it...
"For every seat row in an AC (air conditioned or first class) carriage, British Rail would cram two rows into one of their coaches."
Travelling 1st class on railways in the UK is quite nice too. You may be comparing Indian 1st class with UK cattle class. Maybe it's quite a while since you travelled 1st class on a train in the UK since British Rail was dismantled and privatised a long time ago.
This makes me quite happy, and no I’m not a racist before your snowflake mind wonders
There are a number of countries around the world who really need to get their shit in order, no pun intended but maybe India should provide its people with fucking toilets and a sewage system, before doing anything remotely modern!
That it does not has much to do with the caste system and sewage removal, i.e. who should remove it, i.e. the Dalits (formerly known as "Untouchables"). Apparently higher-caste Indians feel "soiled" by coming in contact with the Dalits who perform this function. (No pun intended.) The problem is "solved" by people simply continuing to crap in fields.
I also understand that funds intended for sewerage systems end up in personal bank accounts ("These people don't need sewerage systems.").
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