Eight years after bomb attack, little has changed.

Monday marked the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing, when more than one thousand pounds of nitrate explosives shut down the 16-acre complex and displaced over 50,000 workers. The Feb. 26, 1993 blast cut the electricity and forced workers to descend in many cases over a hundred stories through smoke-filled darkness. Six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured. Had the cyanide gas in the bombs not vaporized, the body count could have risen catastrophically.

Terrorism still looms large in the minds of Manhattan building owners and workers since Manhattan remains as great a target as ever given recent world events. Just two weeks ago, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani announced that police are in a heightened state of alert after the United States bombed Iraq.

"The cliches are all true. New York City is the mecca. The center of it all - everything happens here," said Robert Louden, director of the criminal justice center at John Jay College. "If a terrorist wants to get maximum exposure, they'll do something here."

According to  several terrorism experts, another attack could be imminent. Which means that preparation is the only means-by-which building owners, land-lords, tenants and law enforcement officials can try to minimize the damage. But how simple is managing a risk that relies on the element of surprise and is carried out by people with nothing to lose?

"Management gets interested for a while after an incident like the World Trade Center bombing. But that dies down after a while," said David Maples, managing director of corporate and events security for Investigative Group International.

Maples, a 26-year veteran FBI agent, supervised the bureau's counter-terrorism division prior to joining a private-sector security firm. He believes that corporations tend to forget about the threat of an attack after a while, "in the interest of saving money."

"It is extremely important for the tenant to be willing to pay for the best security since the landlord only has a generic responsibility," said Maples.

The owners are, in Maple's words, the "first line of defense," while tenants quite often "don't realize their exposure."

Anyone who works in a Manhattan office building knows that the cast of characters who come and go through their lobby is so varied and diverse as to test virtually any screening procedure. "All commercial office buildings require fairly unencumbered access," said Peter DiCapua, senior vice president of Arco Properties and Management. "Once you prevent this access, it stops being a truly commercial building."

With some exceptions, you can enter any office building in Manhattan needing, at most, photo identification.

Given how easy it is for someone to obtain fraudulent identification on the Internet, this is arguably one of the weakest links in the security chain. The perpetrators of the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombing both rented their vehicles with the same thing - fake identification.

"If you try to enter the World Trade Center with a fake ID today, you will in deed  get inside," said Frank Mandelbaum, chairman of Intellicheck, Inc. His firm has developed a scanning device that detects false identification.

A spokesman from the Port Authority, who owns the World Trade Center, did not return repeated calls for comment. And in midtown at another high profile skyscraper, a spokesman from the Empire State Building said that "we do not discuss security issues with the press."

In Mandelbaum's opinion, the World Trade Center is as "porous" as ever, despite the 1993 attack, and he called their security "archaic." He also mentioned that, in his view, a certain downtown Broadway building, where the MTA rents a ton of office space, is a vulnerable target.

It is clearly in Mandelbaum's best interest to categorize security in these buildings as weak, since his business is selling scanning devices. When the issue of high technology in the wrong hands came up, however, his analysis was less promotional.

"The high tech is available to all. Just look at all the fake identification web sites - there are plenty of them. And the governmental agencies cannot tell the difference between these ID's," said Mandelbaum.

One security expert said that every company should have one staff member who works with police and - in the event of an attack - act as liaison between company officials and law enforcement.

"You just cannot wait. You have to be proactive," said Dr. Harvey Kushner,. chairman of the criminal justice and security administration department at Long Island University. Kushner has advised several international corporations on terrorist matters.

"We are reaching a stage where buildings are working out protocols that must be followed in an emergency. Like a fire drill," said Kushner.

Kushner likened such a protocol to "protecting your investment" for both landlords and tenants.

In terms of preparation, Kushner said that "we are much better prepared now than we were in 1993."

That may be the case, but the structural integrity of Manhattan's commercial office space remains compromised according to one professor of civil engineering.

"The builders were never thinking about these issues when they designed these office buildings. It's a fact of life, people look at the design from a business standpoint and they don't want to spend a fortune on stabilizing the structure," said Dr. Theodor Krauthammer, professor of civil engineering and the director of Penn State's new Protective Technology Center. The Center will re search ways in which a terrorist bomb threat can be dealt with, essentially through new structural designs.

Krauthammer credited the World Trade Center's "redundant" design as one reason that it withstood the 1993 blast.

"The damage was localized because of this. In other buildings, however, you do not find such a redundant design. In other words, you can knock down a support column but there are others that can hold the weight," he said. "Technology transfer is key. We'll need to transition this knowledge into the profession."

In the opinion of another structural engineer, "no building is blast proof."

"There are three major hazards you deal with in terms of blast. Glass breakage - where flying glass becomes, in effect, flying daggers - floor collapse and progressive collapse. That's where the entire structure collapses," said Tod Rittenhouse, managing director of the structural division for Weidlinger Associates, an expert on blast engineering. Rittenhouse provided protective design engineering for two replacement embassies in Africa and the new Oklahoma City federal building.

"It really is a chess game, with us trying to keep up with the terrorists and them trying to keep up with us. Unfortunately, with the rise of tensions abroad, this type of activity is now part of the American landscape," said Rittenhouse.