The Federal Aviation Administration has begun a research and development pilot aimed at helping the agency detect and react to hackers before they have a chance to attack FAA systems, IBM and the FAA announced Tuesday. The pilot makes use of recently released IBM software called InfoSphere Streams, which was developed in conjunction with the Department of Defense and can perform real-time analytics on heavy throughput data streams of up to millions of events or messages per second. FAA security analysts are swamped on a daily basis with a massive volume of security information coming from the FAA’s firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and wireless detection systems as well as data feeds from other agencies and commercial security services such as VeriSign’s iDefense. In recent years, they have included theft of personal information on 48,000 former and current employees, a takeover of the FAA’s domain controllers, and a viral infection that forced the FAA to shut down systems in Alaska, according to a 2009 report from the Department of Transportation’s inspector general.