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How much damage to Information Systems

was caused by the September 11, 2001

bombings in New York City.

By: Joseph Vega

October 14, 2012

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Background, on September 11, 2001, terrorist hijacked 3 commercial airplanes. Two of

those airplanes we crashed into the two towers in New York City known as the World

Trade Center Towers , Tower 1 and Tower 2. Both towers collapsed and several

thousand people lost their lives on that day. This report is not about that event per se,

but is about the damage this event caused to some very important informationsystems. Furthermore this report will discuss the recovery of those systems and the

planning which took place prior to September 11, 2001, in the event of a disaster.

Photo above is courtesy of NBC News, it depicts the two towers after the attacks

but before their collapse.

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To completely understand why information systems of major US Banks and other

businesses were damaged as badly as some were there are a couple of important

facts. First, located below and very near to the towers underground were several

trunks [large communication cables] of fiber optic cables. [which were damaged and

not accessible immediately after the disaster.] Second, the relative location of thetowers to the financial district, they were just blocks away. The map below depicts the

relative distance.

As shown above the WFC World Financial Center was across West Street from the towers. Located within the

WFC were some of the Largest and most important banks and other financial company's. All of the businesses

located in the WFC had to relocate all of their operations, including any all information systems which were

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One company which had offices in the World trade towers and another office very near the

Towers was Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley did a lot of preparing for a disaster and had a well

written, well thought out disaster recovery plan. Additionally Morgan Stanley practiced there

plan many times even evacuating all of there employees in mock disasters. The evacuates were

practiced so employees could get a sense and feel for the rush to leave the office and walking

down almost sixty flights of stairs, for those working in the Trade Center Towers. The first practice

evacuation took four hors to get all employees out of the World trade Center Towers. On

September 11, 2001, the planning and practice paid off. Immediately after the first hijacked plane

struck One World Trade Center, Morgan Stanley security executives ordered the company's 3800

employees to evacuate from World Trade Center buildings, Two and Five. This time, it took them

just 45 minutes to get out to safety!

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Many small businesses struggled to recover after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, but

one small company with a comprehensive contingency plan was back in business within a week.

Childs Capital, LLC, a company that specializes in international economic development, is located

very near Ground Zero. The company's chief executive officer was in the World Trade Center

when the first plane hit. "I immediately called the office and told them that it wasn't safe, then

ordered an evacuation and initiated our emergency plan," said Childs Capital Founderand CEO Donna Childs. "We had trained in advance and knew what to do."

As the dust settled, Childs Capital still had to cope with major disruptions to power, telephone,

water and other utilities. "Our building had a back-up generator that allowed us to run some of

the computers, but we had planned to rely on battery-powered laptops," said Childs. Childs

Capital was back in business, albeit in a limited capacity, within a week.

It took the company less than a month to get back to full operation. "I used to be in thereinsurance business and I knew exactly how to document the expenses we were incurring," said

Childs. "Our insurance company paid in full in three days of submission and we were back in

business."

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Equipment orders sky rocket after the bombings.

A partial inventory, according to the Tower Group, a technology research firm, includes 50,000 trading-

desk workstations, at $52,000 each; 34,000 personal computers, at $2,000 to $6,000 each; 8,000 Intel and

5,000 Unix servers at a total cost of about $370 million; 1,000 Bloomberg L.P. information computer

terminals worth an unknown amount; and $300 million in printers, hubs, switches, data storage and other

networking hardware. And added to the total is at least $1.5 billion to put the systems together.

Dell said it had sold more than 24,000 servers, laptops and desktop computers as of Monday to replaceequipment lost in the attacks. The company sent hundreds of technicians to Manhattan and to the

Washington area, converted three 18- wheel trucks into mobile technology support-and-installation

facilities, and chartered an airliner to fly parts from Taiwan to its Texas factory.

One company grappling with a sudden shortage of computers was Lehman Brothers , which had to

evacuate its headquarters in the World Financial Center, next to the World Trade Center complex. Lehmanrelocated quickly to office space in Jersey City that is usually occupied by its operations and technology

staff, and took up new quarters as well in an undisclosed location in Midtown, said William J. Ahearn, a

company spokesman. Over the weekend, boxes of computers, monitors and keyboards arrived, and new

systems were set up in the office space in New Jersey.

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Companies affected by the bombings

read like a Whos Who

in the financial industry.

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) located so very close, the WTC area was the center of

global finance and many nearby financial firms were also adversely affected. Also

affected were many other companies, such as Lufthansa Airlines, and New York

recruiting firm Digital Market Research Inc., The New York Board of Trade (NYBT),

which had its trading floor in the WTC where it dealt in such commodities as

coffee, orange juice, cocoa, sugar and cotton, had to call all employees, one byone. The Nasdaq stock exchange, with headquarters at nearby 1 Liberty Plaza, so

close to the WTC and the bombings there operations were affected also, not to

mention the difficultly employees had getting to offices located so close to the

disasters center. Barclays Bank had planned for evacuating its 1,200-person

investment-banking unit to its disaster recovery site in New Jersey, but the site

proved to be too small for so many employees. Moreover, the bridges and tunnelscrossing the Hudson River were immediately closed so most employees could not

get there. Fortunately Barclay was able to shift much of its work to its London,

Hong Kong, and Tokyo offices, although the time differences forced those workers

to do double shifts.

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Those firms which prepared recovered quickly ones that

didnt did not recover as fast.

"Cold site" recovery requires the companies to back up their own data onto tapes, storing them offsite.If a disaster occurs, the organizations transport their backup tapes to the recovery sites where theyload and boot their applications from scratch using their backup tapes. Although the cold siteapproach is relatively inexpensive, restoring data can be slow, often taking up to 24 hours. If thetapes are stored at the affected site or relatively close by, all data may be permanently lost, whichcould put some companies out of business. Moreover the data for all activity since the last backupwill be lost.

"Hot site" backups can solve some problems, but it could cost some companies as much as $1 millionmonthly. A hot site is located offsite where a reserve computer continually creates a mirror imageof the production computer's data. Should a data disaster occur, the company can quickly switchover to the back up computer and continue to operate. If the production site itself is destroyed, thestaff will actually go to the hot site to operate.

While many companies lost a lot of data in the attack, a recent Morgan Stanley technology team reportsaid the WTC was "probably one of the best-prepared office facilities from a systems and data

recovery perspective." Lower Manhattan's extraordinary data security concern erupted in 1993when a large bomb exploded in the subterranean parking area of the WTC in a terrorist attack. Sixpeople were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. Realizing how vulnerable they were, manycompanies took steps to protect themselves. Pressures for emergency planning further increasedas companies faced the feared Y2K problems. As a result, the data for many organizations wererelatively well protected when the 9/11 WTC attack occurred. Let us look at how someorganizations responded to the attack.

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Those firms which prepared recovered quickly ones that

didnt did not recover as fast.(cont.)

Prior to 1993, to protect itself, the NYBT had contracted with SunGard Data Systems Inc. for "cold

site" disaster recovery. After the 1993 bombing it decided to establish its own hot site. It

rented a computer and trading floor space in Queens for $300,000 annually. It hired

Comdisco to help it set up the hot backup site, which it hoped to never have to use despite

the expense. After the attack the NYBT quickly moved its operations to Queens and began

trading on September 17, along with the NYSE, Nasdaq, and the other exchanges that had

not suffered direct hits.

Sometimes backups are too limited. Most disaster recovery companies and their clients have

been too focused on recovery of mainframes and needed extensive help to recover midrange

systems and servers. Moreover, backups are often stored in the same office or site and so are

useless if the location is destroyed. For example the Board of Trade backed up only some

servers and PCs, and those backups were stored in a fireproof safe in the WTC where they arenow buried beneath many thousands of tons of rubble.

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America's oldest bank, the Bank of New York (BONY)

BONY operations were heavily concentrated in downtown Manhattan, very close to the WorldTrade Center. The bank is headquartered at 1 Wall Street, almost abutting the WTC and hadtwo other sites on Barclay and Church Streets that were even closer. These buildings housed5,300 employees plus the bank's main computer center. On September 11, the bank lost thetwo closest sites and their equipment. The bank had arranged for its computer processing torevert to centers outside New York in case of emergency, but it was not able to follow itsplan. The World Trade Center attack had heavily damaged a major Verizon switching stationat 140 West Street serving 3 million data circuits in lower Manhattan. The loss of thisswitching station left BONY without any bandwidth for transmitting voice and datacommunications to downtown New York, and the bank struggled to find ways to connectwith customers.

The bank's disaster recovery plan called for paper check processing to be moved from its financialdistrict computer center to its Cherry Hill, New Jersey facility. With communication sodisrupted, BONY management decided Cherry Hill was too distant and moved the functionsto its closer center in Lodi, New Jersey. However, that center lacked machines for its lockboxbusiness, in which it opens envelopes that contain bill payments, deposits checks, and readspayment stubs to credit the right accounts.

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America's oldest bank, the Bank of New York (BONY)

part II.

The bank had deliberately planned to have different level of backup for different functions. The bank'sgovernment bond processing was backed up by a second computer that could take over on amoment's notice. No such backup existed for the bank's 350 automated teller machines. The bankrationalized that its customers could use other banks' machines in case of a problem and itscustomers were forced to do that. Even the backup system for the government bond business didnot work properly because the communication lines between its backup sites and clients' backupsites were often of low capacity and had not been fully tested and debugged. For example BONY's

required connection to the Government Securities Clearing Corporation, a central component ofthe government bond market, failed so tapes had to be driven to them for several days. Tradeswere properly posted but clients could not obtain timely reports on their positions. The bank hadalso established redundant telecommunications facilities in case of problems with one line, butthey turned out to be routed through the same physical phone facilities. John Costas, the presidentand COO of UBS Warburg, explained "We've all learned that when we have backup lines, we shouldknow a lot more about where they run."

As a result the Bank of New York's customers expecting funds from the Bank of New York didn't receivethem on time and had to borrow emergency cash for the Federal Reserve. Yet Thomas A. Renyi, theBank of New York's chairman, expressed pride in how the bank had responded. He said "Ourlongstanding disaster recovery plans worked, and they worked in the extreme." It will be monthsbefore BONY can return to its computer center at 101 Barclay Street and the bank is working withIBM on where to locate an interim computer center and ways to improve its backup systems.

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Works Cited & References

Atlas, S. H. (2001, November). The Buck Stopped Here: BONY's Disaster Recovery Comes Under Attack.

Wall Street and Technology.

Blair, Jason. (2001, September20). THE COMPUTERS Billions Will Be Spent on Replacing Technology.

The New York Times.

excite.com. (September 14, 2001). WTC Technology Replacement Costs Billions

excite.com

Fortune. (October 1, 2001). Rebuilding Wall Street,

.Fortune

InfoWorld. (2001, September 19). U.S. Recovery: Cost of Rebuilding N.Y. IT Infrastructures Estimated at $3.2

Billion. InfoWorld.

The New York Times. (2001, October 6). Disruptions Put Bank of New York to the Test,.

The New York Times .The Wall Street Journal. (2001, September 13). Companies Test System-Backup Plans as They Struggle to

Recover Lost Data. The Wall Street Journal.

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