theCube show hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante bring you the break down of top news and issues monopolizing Big Data conversations in day 3 of at Strata 2013. The story of the day is the Iranian hacker threatening to commandeer US drones, a development broken this morning by SiliconAngle’s John Casaretto.

A relatively new Iranian hacker group has managed to hack and access data concerning nuclear intelligence, military information, satellite images, national infrastructure intelligence, which lead to a threat on the vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden.

David Vellante of Wikibon says this marks “the next degree of escalation” in digital warfare, as there is an “almost certainty of attacks on infrastructure.” This particular Pandora’s box was opened by Stuxnet, a malware that outlined how to attack infrastructure such power plants, nuclear facilities, railways, etc.

John Furrier explained that such digital warfare kindles the notion of data security a big issue, as data leakage happens in critical areas exposing data in nuclear activity, biochemistry  security structures and infrastructures. Subsequently, the top news of the Strata event is Intel’s entering the Big Data market with its Hadoop distribution, which focuses mainly on providing performance, and more importantly on enhanced security. Intel brings the concept of cell level security to Big Data, which along with encryption, better ensures data privacy.

Dave Vellante explained that cell level security allows for fine-grained security controls. He also mentioned Accumulo, NSA developed solution to provide such a level of security which they later provided as open source platform through Apache.

Cell level security “opens up massive opportunities in the cloud,” John Furrier added, especially in what multi-tenants are concerned. The main criticism it gets is about performance. David Vellante pointed out that “security has to be designed in, it cannot be an afterthought.” Intel adding security to the Hadoop platform at the hardare level has great potential to solve the issues that have generated such criticism.

Vellante also introduced sqrrl, “a company popped out of the NSA,” which was built around Accumulo with the main purpose of building infrastructure to support application development on top of it. The company sensed that Accumulo has practical, business applications, outside the national security field.  sqrrl enables developers to build applications that simplify development around Accumulo. This security approach will have a significant impact on multi-tenant cloud applications.

Security remains a central topic for the Big Data platform conversation, John Furrier concluded, as the current digital threats are quite real and there is is a stringent need to ensure data privacy and prevent leakage.