Question

CASE STUDY ON THE OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING Instructions: Research a case study on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and address the following questions regarding the protection of assets.

1. In general, describe the types of technology that have been used in the past and what is currently being used to protect assets from various threats. (150-200 words)

2. What technologies were being used to protect the assets when the attack in OKC took place? (150-200 words)

3. How was the OKC attack able to be executed when those technologies were in place? What technologies available today, would have improved the chances of better protecting the assets? (150-200 words)

4. Regarding your environment, apply the lessons of the OKC bombing by explaining how you can better protect the assets in your environment from various threats. (250-300 words).

Answer 1

The Oklahoma City bombing was one of the last major disasters in an era before the widespread proliferation of the internet. Even by September 11, 2001 – just six years later – the way people used technology to communicate had rapidly evolved. But nobody had a smartphone on April 19, 1995.

Walking through the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum with a civil engineer responsible for large office buildings is an interesting experience. They’ll point out all sorts of ways the remains of the Murrah building were incorporated into the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, from exposed steel rebar to the foundation’s original concrete slab. They’re important historical artifacts, but not just because of the tragedy, but also because the way the attack was carried out changed architectural and engineering codes to prevent another.

That shattered glass caused hundreds of injuries on April 19, 1995 – from minor lacerations to wounds requiring feet of stiches. On a larger scale, the truck bomb destroyed a center load-bearing beam that caused a progressive collapse of the northern third of the Murrah building. Carol Ross-Barney, a Chicago-based architect who designed the new Oklahoma City federal building, told The Journal Record’s Molly Fleming the new structure would be far shorter, in order to keep any future collapse confined to a small area and minimize loss of life

Most of the nation’s civil communications and data network infrastructure is not hardened against attack, but this infrastructure tends to be localized either in geography or in mode of communication. Thus, if no physical damage is done to them, the computing and communications capabilities disrupted in an attack are likely to be recoverable in a relatively short time. Although their scope or scale is limited, they are nonetheless potentially attractive targets for what might be called “incremental” terrorism. That is, terrorists could use IT as the weapon in a series of relatively local attacks that are repeated against different targets—such as banks, hospitals, or local government services—so often that public confidence is shaken and significant economic disruption results.

However, this report focuses primarily on catastrophic terrorism, and the committee’s analysis is aimed at identifying threats of that magnitude in particular and at proposing science and technology (S&T) strategies for combating them. Of course, serious efforts are needed to develop and deploy security technologies to harden all elements of the IT infrastructure to reduce the potential for damage from repeated attacks.