Terrorism in America: Sensitive Data Could Have Survived

Data storage and backup expert Dale Callahan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering says that it is likely that much of the financial and government data from offices in the devastated World Trade Center and Pentagon is preserved.

Posted on September 12, 2001 at 2:49 p.m.

 

 

 

STORY:

  

Data storage and backup expert Dale Callahan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering says that it is likely that much of the financial and government data from offices in the devastated World Trade Center and Pentagon is preserved.

 

 

 

WHO:

  

Callahan has more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. He was recently a national representative for national standards bodies involving SS7 and ATM billing. Previously he worked with the BellSouth Technology Assessment Center (BTAC) where he was responsible for testing Advanced Intelligent Networking (AIN) software and hardware. His research interests include wireless communications, remote sensing, robotics, biomedical modeling, signal processing, voice recognition, optical networks and telecommunications.

 

 

 

WHAT:

  

“Government and financial institutions are similar to telecommunications companies. Their data is considered very sensitive and they take it very seriously. Especially the financial institutions. It’s not just their money, it’s also individuals’ money. It is likely that their backup strategies are redundant. One possibility is that every third day, data is moved from the site to another location -- the previous day’s backup would be in the office and accessible, the day before’s backup would be in another location in the building and the day before that would be stored off-site. Worst case scenario here would be two or three days of data lost. However, some businesses do not have adequate backup plans. In that instance, worst case scenario: everything is lost.”

“However, it is possible that computers could have been linked to two or three other computers off site and data was backed up continuously. In this case, if one of the computers ceased working due to catastrophic event, nothing would happen to the data and all up to the event would be preserved.”

 

 

 

CALL:

  

Jennifer Park, UAB Media Relations, (205) 934-3888 or jpark@uab.edu. After hours, call (205) 934-3411 and ask for the Media Relations person on call.