“An adversary has spent months executing a cyberattack on an unnamed part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, after years of planning. Now, the disruption to daily American life is reaching its climax. First, there is a distributed denial of service, or DDoS,’ attack that masks a massive theft of data crucial to plotting the final coordinated strike. No one notices because security personnel are too busy trying to revive systems overwhelmed by a deluge of bogus network traffic.

The adversary clinched passwords and network blueprints during earlier, smaller hacks and now is ready to dive into the key sector’s IT environment with prefabricated malware. The sector’s activities stop and IT administrators are locked out from their own systems.

If first responders had been using big data analytics, they might have prevented the final step in the assault, according to national security recommendations for President Barack Obama that are up for a vote Wednesday.”

Source: Presidential Advisers Recommend Countering Cyberattacks, Shootings with Big Data – Nextgov.com