With great power comes great responsibility – a look at the distribution of short URLs on Twitter

As we've recently discussed, short URL services are becoming more and more popular among social networks. And the recent event when such a service got compromised highlighted the sensitivity of the problem.

We've decided to see exactly how popular each of these URL shortening services are on Twitter. So we've collected all the URLs from the public timeline and thought it would be nice to share the results with the world. These statistics are based on data collected during a 24 hours timeframe.

As you can see, more than half of the URLs posted on Twitter belong to bit.ly, making it the winning service with 53.75%. Tinyurl.com is on the 2nd place, but with a very big gap between it and the 1st place, having just 7.55%. Twitpic.com accounts for 4.70% of all URLs tweeted, but as it is not actually an URL shortening service, but just an image hosting website for Twitter users, we cannot really say it's part of the top . But is.gd definitely is the last component of the top 3 – with just 1.73%.

What's really worth noticing is that more than half of the URLs that are being tweeted every day are hosted by a single service – bit.ly. But with great power comes great responsibility and compromise of their service would mean a compromise of more than half of the URLs circulating every day on Twitter. Having security in mind all the time, I would've been happier to see the share of these URL shortening services being spread more even between them, with no such clear winner.

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• McAfee Avert Labs has discovered a new zero-day Adobe vulnerability that takes advantage of a new "Rich Media" feature to add interactive Flash (swf) content to PDF files.
• These can cause Adobe Reader to execute arbitrary code when viewed and when successful, shellcode in the exploit is executed by the application, which redirects the victim to other malicious IP addresses.
• This malware acts as a backdoor to allow remote access to the infected computer.
• The "Rich Media" annotation is new to Acrobat 9.x and will not be readable by older versions, so PDF viewers with Adobe Acrobat or Reader 8 and older and will not be vulnerable to this attack.
• Even though anti-malware vendors continue to add detection for new zero-day threats, the best prevention is to refrain from opening attachments from untrustworthy sources.