News of an explosion at the White House that injured President Obama was posted on the Associated Press twitter feed @AP just after 10AM PDT. The news caused the stock market to dip almost immediately but then bounced back up after a AP claimed that its official twitter feed had been hacked. According to Bloomberg reporters, “AP's fake tweet erased $136 billion in equity market value in 3 minutes.”
At 10:16 PDT Press secretary Jay Carney gave a briefing in which AP White House corespondent Julie Pace opened by stating that AP's Twitter account had in fact compromised.
Julie: Thanks, Jay. I just want to say at the top that it appears as though AP’s Twitter account has been hacked, so anything that was just sent out about any incident at the White House is absolutely false. And we'll be putting something out shortly to clarify that, if that hasn’t happened already.
MR. CARNEY: Good, I thank you for that. I appreciate that, and I can say that the President is fine. I was just with him.
The scare comes just one day after the house passed the controversial CISPA bill which addresses cyber security. Reports site a group called The Syrian Electronic Army as being responsible. The group @Official_SEA6 had previously been suspended from Twitter after reportedly hacking other mainstream media channels' twitter accounts. @Official_SEA6 has claimed responsibility for the hoax on their Twitter feed.
@AP The Associated Press on Twitter has been suspended along with its sub-accounts including @AP_politics. A spokesman from AP has acknowledged the breach and an article has been published by AP regarding the issue.
The hacktivist group Anonymous has reached headlines in the past few months for their clandestine operations. Last week Anonymous hacked the facebook page of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church. Anonymous' @Anon_Central feed has been a forum for today's cyber attack with the Syrian Electronic Army posting the AP user name and password that were used in the hack.
In recent years the mainstream news media has been dominated by social networking. Twitter has become the hub for all the major networks broadcasting hash tags along with the news stories. With AP being among the top news media outlets in the United States, their Twitter account is the source of up to date news for millions of users and for many news publications. After today's hoax and the resulting stock market plunge, the influence of social media remains undeniable with Twitter dominating the news media.
