Government information technology professionals are using more internal social media networks and fewer external networks than they were 18 months ago, according to a new survey.

In addition, video and multi-media are on the rise, and blogs are falling in popularity, among the same government IT users, the study also indicated.

The survey of 100 federal, state and local government IT professionals was commissioned by HP and performed by Wakefield Research. The company released results on April 24. Wakefield had performed a similar survey in September 2010 as well.

In 2012, the most popular “Gov 2.0” application being used by the government IT professionals was video and multi-media sharing, reported by 53 percent, up from 44 percent in the 2010 survey.

Read more @ fcw.com

From Kim Stephens @ idisaster 2.0

It has been documented that government agencies often experience a 500% increase in the number of followers and “fans” to their social media sites during a disaster. Monitoring those sites and responding to requests for information can become overwhelming: at a minimum it is most certainly labor intensive. Emergency management organizations, both government and non-governmental alike, are starting to understand how enormous this task could be and are looking for innovative solutions to solve the problem.  Anaheim, California has turned to their CERT members.

This tweet by Craig Fugate is over a year old, suggesting that the concept of CERT members playing a role in monitoring social networks or even in reporting observations through those platforms, is not necessarily a new idea. The concept is built on the notion that these folks are “trusted agents,” already trained in basic emergency skills, and  known quantities by the response organization. However, I have yet to really see many CERTs move in this direction, making the Anaheim CERT a really interesting test case.  I interviewed the CERT coordinator in order to determine what was necessary in order to accomplish this goal. (I appreciate their candidness!) Below are the results from that interview.

Read more @ idisaster 2.0

On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a national team of scientists warns that inadequate knowledge about the effects of deepwater oil well blowouts threatens scientists’ ability to help manage comparable future events.

The findings are reported in a paper published in the May issue of the journal Bioscience. The authors comprise a renowned group of ecotoxicologists, oceanographers, and ecologists — calling themselves the Gulf Oil Spill Ecotoxicology Working Group — who convened under the auspices of the National Science Foundation-supported National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis while the 2010 spill was still active.

A University of California Davis release reports that the article argues that a fundamentally new approach to the study of deepwater spills is needed, particularly because the oil industry is now putting most of its exploration efforts into deep water.

Read more @ homelandsecuritynewswire.com

The mysterious caller claimed to be from Microsoft and offered step-by-step instructions to repair damage from a software virus. The electric power companies weren’t falling for it.

The caller, who was never traced or identified, helpfully instructed the companies to enable specific features in their computers that actually would have created a trapdoor in their networks. That vulnerability would have allowed hackers to shut down a plant and thrown thousands of customers into the dark.

The power employees hung up on the caller and ignored the advice.

The incident from February, documented by one of the government’s emergency cyber-response teams, shows the persistent threat of electronic attacks and intrusions that could disrupt the country’s most critical industries.

Read more @ hstoday.us

Space weather, and in particular coronal mass ejections (violent eruptions from the Sun’s atmosphere), can cause huge disruption to many highly technological systems on Earth. In 1989 five million people were left without electricity, causing billions of dollars in damages and losses to business, as Earth experienced its largest geomagnetic storm in decades. Professor Mike Hapgood, head of the space environment group at STFC’s RAL Space and chair of an expert group advising the U.K. government on space weather risks, addresses the issue of space weather and infrastructure protection in a comment piece for this week’s Nature.

The U.K. Science & Technology Facilities Council quotes him to say that although the timing of coronal mass ejections can be predicted with increasing accuracy through missions such as NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), more work is needed to understand how big a storm we might encounter in future.

Read more @ homelandsecuritynewswire.com