AboutCarolyn Meinel Expertise I cover Windows, Unix, TCP/IP and Ethernet security questions. I do not cover Mac, Palm Pilot, or other networking issues.
Experience Books by Carolyn Meinel: wrote a chapter for The Hacking of America book (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567204600/happyhacker)
My article Code Red for the Web for Scientific American was reprinted in the book Best American Science Writing 2002 (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060936509/happyhacker). My book The Happy Hacker: A Guide to Mostly Harmless Hacking is now in 4th edition with a Japanese edition (see http://happyhacker.org/hhbook/).
Question The website irctc.co.in is not opening in my IE browser and I need it for online reservation. Please help me..
Answer Your IE browser might have become infected with some sort of adware or spyware that keeps you from reaching this site. Alternatively, if you tried to reach it by clicking on a link from an email you received, that link might instead taken you to a fake version of this site run by criminals who will take your money but not make your reservations. If this is the case, the authorities would have shut down the fake site and that would be why you couldn't reach it.
Here's a solution to your problem. First, download and install the Firefox browser, free from Mozilla.org. If FIrefox can reach http://irctc.co.in/ but your IE brwoser can't, then you know your IE browser has been infected by something. To clean it,
1) Download F-Secure's Complete Internet security suite, which offers a free thirty day trial: https://store.f-secure.com/cgi-bin/dlreg/ml=EN?ID=FSISTB&desid=TRIAL
2) Disconnect from the Internet.
3) Uninstall your current antivirus. This is absolutely essential because otherwise it and F-Secure will fight each other and might crash your computer. It isn't good enough to just turn off your old antivirus because it probably has been crippled by your virus infection.
4) Install F-Secure.
5) Run a complete scan of your computer. Follow any instructions F-Secure might give you.
6) Reboot.
If this works, you can either keep F-Secure or uninstall it and reinstall your old antivirus.
7) After this, if you decide you would rather keep your old antivirus, you can reinstall it and get all the latest updates right away. Usually antivirus companies are pretty good about updating their programs whenever some new virus figures out how to evade or cripple their product.
Now if neither Firefox or IE can access http://irctc.co.in/, not even after running an F-Secure scan, then your problem is somewhere in the network and you need to talk to your online service provider about the problem.
