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NEW DELHI: In the past six months, nearly 58% attempts to book train tickets online were by bots, not real people, the railway ministry informed Lok Sabha Wednesday. It said that on average 888 crore requests out of 1,538 crore in a month were bots, and those were flagged as automated requests and their access to the e-ticketing system was denied.A bot is an automated software application that performs repetitive tasks over a network. It follows specific instructions to imitate human behaviour at a faster rate. In a written reply, railway minister Ashwni Vaishnaw said that such “spurious attempts” that were denied access to e-ticketing systems was the maximum in June — nearly 66% of the 1,912 crore requests by bots.“Bot manager in the system protects websites at its own cloud servers by using user behavioural analysis, bot signature/ pattern matching, and real-time risk scoring to instantly distinguish humans and bots and software,” an IRCTC official said.Vaishnaw said the train ticket reservation system is robust and highly secure, and equipped with industry-standard, state-of-the-art cybersecurity controls while highlighting measures taken by railways to safeguard the system from cyber attacks, and prevent auto-filling of forms by hacking tools to curb fraud in Tatkal ticket bookings.The minister said that multiple protective layers such as network firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, application delivery controllers and web application firewalls have been deployed to safeguard the system against cyber threats. He added that little over three crore suspicious user IDs had been deactivated and 6.2 crore had been placed under revalidation during 2025-26 and 2026-27 (up to June 30).The ministry said that 503 complaints have been lodged on the National Cyber Crime Portal for suspicious booking and 13,343 suspicious emails have been blocked in the past one-and-half years. In addition, since 2021, Railway Protection Force has arrested 22,676 touts and legal action has been taken.
