Explosion at the White House (NOT)

A Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times"

AP Twitter account hacked, 'explosions at White House' tweet crashes DOW

A hacker compromised the main Twitter account for the Associated Press on Tuesday, creating momentary chaos across the world by inaccurately posting that US President Barack Obama was injured by an explosion in the White House

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RT,

23 April, 2013

Just after 1 p.m. EST, a message sent by the account @AP read “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”

Journalists inside the White House at the time of the tweet quickly refuted the claim and reported that no blast had been felt at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The AP announced from a separate account moments later that the initial tweet was not true and that hackers wrote and published the incorrect claim.

"The @AP Twitter account has been suspended after it was hacked. The tweet about an attack on the White House was false," the news agency announced.

White House spokesman Jay Carney went on the air moments later to confirm that the president had not been harmed by any reported explosion.

“The president is fine,” Carney said. “I was just with him.”

Immediately after the fake tweet went live, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 took drastic nosedives before quickly rebounding.

The Syrian Electronic Army is taking credit for the compromise, but have yet to provide evidence. Just days earlier, though, Twitter suspended that group’s main account after they took responsibility for hacking @60Minute, @48Hours and @CBSDenver — three accounts all registered to CBS News.

With Tuesday’s hack, whoever is responsible again targeted multiple accounts. The Associated Press has confirmed that, their @AP_Mobile account has been compromise as well.

Mike Baker, an Olympia, Washington-based reporter for AP, says on Twitter that his company’s main account was hacked “less than an hour after some of us received an impressively disguised phishing email.” According to a report published Tuesday in the New York Times, a spokesperson for AP also confirms that malware has infected a number of the company’s computers in recent days.

The Associated Press’ main Twitter account is followed by nearly 2 million social media users.

AP Just Got Hacked And A Fake Tweet Caused The Stock Market To Tank

Business Insider,

23 April, 2013

Story of the day: The AP twitter feed was hacked, and "reported" that there was an explosion at The White House, injuring Barack Obama.

The tweet looked like this. It came just after 1 PM ET.

Twitter/@AP

Of course the story was false, though it remained uncorrected for several minutes. Eventually an AP employee tweeted that the company's account had been compromised.

But in that time, the stock market briefly tanked.

The Dow had been up over 100, but it then lost 150 points.

The market did recover.

So how did that happen that a tweet caused the market to dive?

It's not that everyone on Wall Street is watching AP's Twitter.

But here was our inbox from when it happened. Brokers instantly started emailing everyone with the headline, before walking it back.

We've blacked out the names of the folks passing on the tweet.

Business Insider

Bottom line. Stuff moves really fast from Twitter to trader inboxes and then to the market itself.

From Bloomberg