Dennis Fisher

In the face of continued attacks on federal agencies and contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and IRC Federal that do highly sensitive security work for the U.S. government, Sen. John McCain has asked Senate leaders to appoint a select committee to look into the attacks and data leaks that have plagued Washington throughout 2011.

The Internet was not designed to be a secure network, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was meant to enable giant PDPs and IMPs at one college to talk to their brethren at another college across the country. SSL was an attempt to impose some level of security and trustability on this system after the fact, but the last few years have shown that it has a lot of limitations, and to some degree has given users a misplaced faith in the fragile certificate authority infrastructure. Now, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike is hoping to change some of that.

The United States used to be the leading industrial nation in the world, producing the best cars, TVs, clothes and deep-fried Twinkies. Those days are gone, but the U.S. can still claim primacy in one important area: the most malware-infested, phishing-friendly hosting provider.

Microsoft has patched a critical vulnerability in Windows 7 and Windows Vista related to the Bluetooth stack in the operating system. The bug is the lone critical vulnerability fixed in today’s Patch Tuesday release, and Microsoft officials said it’s unlikely that it can be used for remote code execution.

For Android users, the refrain must be getting a little tiresome: Researchers have found another batch of apps in the Android Market that were infected with malware. Once again, it was the DroidDream malware family causing the trouble, but this time, it was just a handful of apps and they were only in the market for a little while.

The metrics movement that has been slowly but surely infiltrating the security community in the last few years has had its own annual gathering–Metricon–for some time now. It’s been a small, quasi-academic conference since its inception, but now Metricon’s organizers are branching out a bit, bringing in some speakers and content that are outside the norm and appealing to a broader audience.

The Apple iPhone may still be the gold standard when it comes to smartphones, but the Android platform has become the playground of choice for attackers and malware authors looking to make a quick buck. The latest example is a premium-rate SMS Trojan that not only automatically sends costly SMS messages, but also prevents users’ carriers from notifying them of the new charges.