Fake Tweet fires panic

Hackers post ‘US blast news’

WASHINGTON: Hackers backing Syria’s regime spooked US markets temporarily after they broke into the Associated Press’s Twitter account and falsely reported President Barack Obama had been injured in two blasts at the White House.

A brief alert on the news agency’s AP account yesterday read: ‘‘Breaking: Two explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.’’

Almost immediately the wire service posted via its corporate communications feed that its AP Twitter account had been hacked, before promptly suspending the service.

‘‘ Advisory: AP Twitter account has been hacked. Tweet about an attack at the White House is false. We will advise more as soon as possible,’’ AP – CorpComm posted.

AP spokesman Paul Colford later said the wire service had disabled other Twitter accounts following the attack and was working with the micro-blogging site to investigate the breach.

The FBI also said it was investigating the incident. White House spokesman Jay Carney said: ‘‘I can say that the president is fine. I was just with him.’’

Stock markets plunged just as the report came out, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 130 points, or 0.9 per cent, and the S&P 500 dropping 12 points, or 0.8 per cent. Just as quickly they rebounded to where they were before the tweet, all within three or four minutes.

Online activists backing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad claimed responsibility for the hack.

The group — the so-called Syrian Electronic Army — hacked the Twitter feeds of high- profile news organisations AFP and CBS News earlier this year.