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Software terror tool
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| Good article found on NEWS.com
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Software terror tool
By Rory Callinan
September 23, 2002
AL-QAEDA terrorists have obtained Australian computer software pinpointing weak spots in skyscrapers and dams, according to the FBI.
Australia shown attack plans
War on terror latest
The sophisticated programs, developed in Sydney and Adelaide, were found stored in a computer belonging to an associate of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.
A Federal Bureau of Investigation bulletin titled "Terrorist Interest in aWter Supply and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) Systems", issued early this year, said the material had been unearthed in the Afghanistan capital, Kabul.
The software, called Microstran and CATIGE, could be used by engineers to find stress points and weaknesses in buildings, bridges and dams.
The discovery prompted one of the software developers, a South Australian academic, to speculate that terrorists might have obtained the programs from students at the engineering faculty of Adelaide University in the 1990s.
Microstran was developed by a firm of Sydney engineers and marketed in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with some sales to the Middle East.
It was designed for the gauging of strengths and weaknesses in structures such as bridges and buildings.
CATIGE (computer aided teaching in geotechnical engineering) was less widely distributed because it was developed at Adelaide University as an educational tool for engineering students.
It contained a program which assessed the level of leakage or seepage from dams, and has been distributed to universities around the world.
Only a few thousand legal copies are believed to exist, although it was given to undergraduates as part of a package of computer programs on a university CD ROM.
There is no suggestion that the developers or distributors of either program have any connection with terrorists.
Adelaide University geotechnical engineering lecturer Mark Jaksa, who developed CATIGE, believed there was a chance the Afghan programs might have come from a CD ROM given to undergraduate students a few years ago.
"I think it's probably more likely they (terrorists) have come in contact with someone who has studied at Adelaide because those two programs were given to our students -- BEAM and CATIGE," he said.
However, other engineers were not convinced the BEAM program was the same as the one on the CD ROM.
Mr Jaksa said terrorists would need detailed information about any structure to make use of his program.
He said it appeared the terrorists had "gone around to try and find structural and geotechnical software . . . that would have helped them".
Microstran co-developer John Morgan said he was surprised by the FBI report.
"We have no information to say definitely it is ours. We really don't know," he said.
"There are programs with similar names in (the) engineering area."
The 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists linked to the September 11 hijacking tragedy included some with engineering skills. | |
| thecomeons 2002-09-27, 7:15 am |
| hopefully it is just scaremongering.
the amount of effort and resources required by a terrorist or waring nation in such and endeavour must be astronomical. |
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