Agency Twitter use has become an important factor in communication between the Federal community and the public. Agencies that have the best Twitter strategy, such as the State Department, tend to have been present on Twitter for the longest and have picked up the most followers. […]

Extreme vetting will require better, smarter data, according to Donna Roy, executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Sharing and Services Office. She spoke at MeriTalk’s Big Data Brainstorm. […]

Though many small businesses may think that they are too trivial to be the target of a cyberattack, even the smallest businesses can face cyberattack and can face serious repercussions, according to Pat Toth, supervisory computer scientist in the computer security division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and author of NIST’s cybersecurity guide “Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals.” […]

If agencies improve their threat monitoring, correlation, and protection automation, they could save an estimated 27 percent, or $5 billion annually, of their cybersecurity budgets, according to a MeriTalk survey titled Pedal to the Metal: Mitigating New Threats Faster with Rapid Intel and Automation. […]

The First Responder Network Authority recently opened a new laboratory at its headquarters in Boulder, Colo. […]

Farmers should save their cows’ numbers in their phones because cows can now send farmers a text message when they’re feeling under the weather. Austrian startup SmaXtec built a half-pound, hot dog-size, Wi-Fi-enabled sensor that can be embedded into a cow’s stomach to detect the pH of the cow’s stomach and other factors in order to send farmers a message before the cow gets visibly sick. […]

The General Services Administration will start a council of agency Web and digital directors by Dec. 8, according to a memorandum from Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott. […]

The Internet of Things is a great tool for those with disabilities, experts say, but government and industry can do more to ensure that IoT devices are accessible by all, through the implementation of universal design. […]

The day before the election, the White House and other Federal agencies are getting ready to mitigate and strike back if necessary, in the event of a state-sponsored cyberattack against the United States. Ann Barron-DiCamillo, former director of the Department of Homeland Security’s computer emergency readiness team, said the denial-of-service attack against Dyn in October “had all the signs of…a drill.” […]

All 50 states have reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for cybersecurity services, a DHS official said on the day before Election Day. […]

In the wake of October’s Distributed Denial of Service attack that used hundreds of unsecured devices to prevent access to a number of U.S. websites, Reps. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., wrote a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez asking that her agency take action to ensure greater security of Internet of Things devices. […]

The Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy recently announced up to $32 million in funding for 10 innovative projects as part of its newest program: Next-Generation Energy Technologies for Connected and Autonomous On-Road Vehicles. […]

The White House on Thursday launched Code.gov, a website where the code for government platforms will be publicly accessible. […]

If government agencies don’t cooperate with both each other and the private sector on threat intelligence, they’ll never be able to keep up with the hackers working against them, according to Cloudera’s director of cybersecurity strategy, Sam Heywood. […]

Federal agencies consider cloud computing, mobility, and big data to be the most important technologies to their organizations, according to Dell EMC’s survey released Wednesday. […]

MeriTalk conducted a Q&A with Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. In May 2016, he and his team launched the Observatory on Social Media, a big data hub for people to analyze social media trends. […]

The need for mobility and security has propelled cloud adoption forward, but agencies are still trying to figure out what to do with it, according to Sonu Singh, president and chief executive officer of 1901 Group. “IT in the government is going to change more in the next five years than the past 30 years,” Singh said at MeriTalk’s Cloud Connect 2016 event on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. […]

The speed of government cloud adoption and authorization is both good and bad, depending on which agency is asked, according to panelists at Dell EMC World. “Some of the slowness works to our advantage,” said Annette Moore, acting director and acting CIO at the NASA Johnson Space Center. “In instances it certainly does not.” […]

When the cloud houses many single applications that aren’t designed to work with other servers, it can indicate communication problems within government agencies. The Small Business Administration uses the same application on two different cloud networks. “Two offices that never talk to each other, they’re doing the same thing,” said Maria Roat, chief information officer at the SBA, who spoke at Cloud Connect on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. “The problem right now is the cloud is really siloed.” […]

The U.S. Air Force is talking to Congress about starting a multiyear, replenishable fund for cloud computing, according to Frank Konieczny, the chief technology officer of the Office of Information Dominance and chief information officer of the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Air Force. […]

Ninety percent of policymakers, open data experts, and private sector leaders believe that the standardization and publication of government data relating to their field has improved to at least some extent over the last few years, according a report from the Data Foundation and Grant Thornton. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced the release of CyberSeek, an interactive map that shows cybersecurity job availability by both state and locality. […]

In order to ensure the security of IT devices while also reducing the proliferation of “shadow IT” in the government, agencies must work to create “win-win” compromises with device users, according to panelists at Dell EMC World. […]

The Department of Education, the Agency for International Development, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced public access plans to increase access to Federally funded research. […]

The hacker group the Shadow Brokers released files Monday alleging to show which foreign governments and organizations were under surveillance by the National Security Agency. The Shadow Brokers directly asked the U.S. government to pay for the remaining files to be returned. […]

In the push to modernize legacy IT systems, agencies should be more strategic about which systems they choose to invest in, according to experts at Dell EMC World. […]

In the wake of recent Dyn attacks that temporarily shut down major websites such as Twitter, Amazon, and PayPal, Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., sent a letter to President Obama this week to request a strengthening of the U.S. ability to detect and respond to major vulnerabilities. […]

The White House released a proposed guidance on modernizing Federal IT that is open for public comment until Nov. 26. […]

The National Technical Information Service named data.world, a social network for people interested in working with data, as one of 35 organizations announced as partners for its Joint Venture Partnership program. […]

America’s Internet infrastructure could be seeing other denial-of-service attacks similar to the one targeted at Dyn last week, according to Josh Finke at Iron Bow. The large scale of the attack, the availability of the source code for the malware online, and the number of susceptible Internet of Things devices, make this type of attack attractive to hackers. […]