On Tuesday, Pakistan Railways (PR Electronics) system of e-ticketing and financial and human resources crashed, leaving 60 online reservation offices disconnected from the main servers in fear of data loss from 2016 to date.
It is yet to be known whether the malfunction occurred because of an attack by hackers or because of the system’s non-maintenance.
By using the National Telecom Corporation’s host server, the PR administration said they had restored the online seat reservation system. They are however, trying to rebuild the structure in order to recover data on finances, wages, pensions etc.
On Wednesday Farooq Iqbal Malik, PR office IT director stated: “We have begun to recover data by using other applications and servers accessible to us.”
He said that because the team was retrieving the data, he was unable to confirm the possibility of hackers targeting the device.
“We will start finding the reasons behind the system’s failure after retrieving data,” he added.
“The system went into shutdown mode all of a sudden,” an official source told.
The PR administration also brought some IT experts from the market to recover the data and used the NTC host server to understand the situation, the official, requesting anonymity said.
“I believe the PR administration should have agreed much sooner to engage the NTC rather than relying on its capabilities. It is our officials’ negligence,” he said, adding that an investigation had been ordered to find out the reason behind the failure of the system.
