Hacked AP Twitter feed reporting fake White House attack rocks markets

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/hacked-ap-twitter-feed-rocks-market-after-sending-false-news-flash/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Apr 23 2013

Stock prices plunged and then quickly recovered after a Twitter account 
belonging to the Associated Press was hacked and used to send a bogus report 
falsely claiming that the White House had been bombed and President Obama was 
injured.

"The @AP Twitter account has been suspended after it was hacked," an unaffected 
Twitter account belonging to the news organization confirmed. "The tweet about 
an attack on the White House was false."

In a testament to the power that social media has on real-world finances, the 
Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 150 points, or about 1 percent, immediately 
following the tweet, with other indexes reacting similarly. The Dow quickly 
regained the lost ground about seven minutes after the sell-off began, when the 
AP confirmed that the report was false.

The bogus tweet was sent from one of at least of two compromised Twitter 
accounts belonging to the Associated Press. Mike Baker, a reporter with the 
167-year-old news organization, said the AP's mobile Twitter account was 
compromised as well. "The @AP hack came less than an hour after some of us 
received an impressively disguised phishing email," he wrote in a separate 
Twitter dispatch. In recent days security personnel with the news cooperative 
discovered malware had infected some of its computers, officials told the New 
York Times.

[...]


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