(Bloomberg) — A three-hour shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange on the same day that a network failure halted all United Airlines flights in the U.S. had people across the country thinking one thing: cyber-attack.

It wasn't, but the July 8 incidents were alarmingly close to the Armageddon scenario that Austin Berglas, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, described in an interview last month, in which the Nasdaq exchange, the New York subway system and power provider Con Edison go offline at the same time.

Berglas, who started the FBI's New York cybercrime unit in 2009 and worked on probes into a breach at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the Silk Road drug market, joined corporate investigations company K2 Intelligence in April. The firm is partly owned by American International Group Inc., which is seeking to sell insurance policies for property and infrastructure damage caused by hackers and cyberterrorists.

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