In this week's Technically News: Can Open Standards Help During the Next Major Disaster; The Search Engine That Finds Everything; DISA Moving Exabytes to the Cloud; Cybersecurity Budgets Increase Across Departments; How Do You Tax the Cloud; U.S. Navy Looks to the Cloud

Jim Wiggins is the Executive Director of the Federal IT Security Institute and the Wounded Warrior Cyber Combat Academy. He's one of the keynote speakers for this year's GovDefenders free online cybersecurity conference. We've sat down with Jim beforehand to discuss different aspects about cybersecurity training including why budgets for training are decreasing even when spending is increasing, what qualities to look for in a IT security professional, and how training has evolved over the last decade.

John Nicholson is the President of the Washington D.C. Metro Chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and one of the keynote speakers during this year's GovDefenders Cybersecurity Virtual Event. In preparation for the big event, we briefly interviewed John about cloud computing. Watch the below video to learn: "What resources can the Federal cloud community tap into regarding contracting and best practices?" and "How can cloud providers leverage the CSA's Cloud Controls Matrix and are there any currently leveraging it?"

In this week's Technically News: Federal Data Center Consolidation Changes Approach; BYOD: An Issue for the Army; Government CIOs Need Line-of-Sight Authority; Everyone Has a Role in Cybersecurity; Phone-DOS Attacks Target Government Offices.

The GovDefenders Cybersecurity Virtual Event, presented by DLT Solutions, is a free cyber event focused on the public sector. Join us from your desk on Wednesday, April 24 as professionals from leading IT companies, including NetApp, Symantec, ForeScout, Red Hat, Quest Software, now a part of Dell, SolarWinds, and DLT Solutions, as we discuss trends, best practices, and the future of public sector cybersecurity.

Last month the National Institute of Standards (NIST) database of software vulnerabilities, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), was taken offline for several days because it was discovered that the web servers hosting the NVD, as well as other government databases, had been compromised by a software vulnerability. In this blog, I’ll review the problem; next week I’ll identify tools and processes that can help solve the problem.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Top Threats Working Group today released, The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013 - a revised report aimed to provide organizations with up-to-date, expert-informed understanding of cloud security threats in order to make educated risk-management decisions regarding cloud adoption strategies. Today's review: Data Breaches.

This week in Technically News: Amazon Reportedly Signs $600M Cloud Deal With CIA; Data-Centric Cybersecurity in the Time of Shared Infrastructures; US Expanding Cybersecurity Watch; The Public Sector Needs Proactive Cybersecurity; Cybersecurity: Crime, Warfare, or Scaremongering.

Andrew "weev" Auernheimer will spend the next 41 months in federal prison. His crime? In 2010, he exposed a security flaw in AT&T's iPad user database, gaining access to the information of over 100,000 people. I want to ponder this question I asked myself after reading about Andrew: what role can public hackers play in government cybersecurity?

This week in Technically News: Hacked Federal Cybersecurity Databases Raise More Alarms; Is Your City the Tech Smartest; Could WW3 Start with a Cyberattack: Symantec's CTO Weighs In; Will Sequestration Compromise Agency Cybersecurity.