| Sandia and FDA develop new food safety risk assessment system
The downloadable software, called ‘CARVER + Shock,’ provides a series of interactive questions which help companies of any size determine vulnerabilities along their food-processing chain. It also warns of the attractiveness of each production step to an attacker. Food-processing employees can learn to use the software in just a few hours. CARVER was originally developed by the US military to evaluate targets to determine which would be most attractive to an adversary. Its current use, computerized under the supervision of Sandia researchers, applies this method to food production from the target’s point of view. But could CARVER’s questions — ‘more than a hundred, less than 200,’ — be useful to terrorist groups in determining where to attack? “The software [by itself] is not a checklist,” says Sandia manager Jeff Danneels whose background is in risk and security assessments. “It won’t tell you where vulnerabilities in a process are. The companies who use it will have to control access to their results. But the only way many stay in business — particularly for the largest — has always been to keep their products proprietary and secret. They’ll have to do the same here.” More details: http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/vltcarv.html
•Date: 21st June 2007 • Region: US •Type: Article •Topic: Terrorism
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