A group of hackers broke into the Twitter account of the Associated Press and posted a false news report on Tuesday about President Barack Obama being injured in two explosions at the White House.
Within a few minutes the US news wire service said its Twitter feed had been hacked, and immediately suspended the account.
“Our accounts have been hacked,” AP spokeswoman Erin Madigan-White said at AP headquarters in New York. “It was a bogus tweet.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney, who opened a regular White House briefing about five minutes after the false tweet, immediately said, “The president is fine.”
The hoax report read, “Breaking: Two explosions in the White House and the President is injured.” The AP, which is the US news service of record, did not move the report on its news wire. The AP’s twitter account, which is closely followed by media organizations, has 1.9 million followers.
“Hackers compromise main @AP Twitter account, sending out erroneous tweet about #WhiteHouse attack. There has been no attack at #WhiteHouse,” AP tweeted from another account, AP Courtside Seat.
A shadowy group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the hoax.
“@AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army!” said the group on its Twitter feed @official_sea6, above a photo showing the false tweet overlaid with Syrian imagery.
The group has recently targeted prominent twitter accounts including broadcaster BBC, CBS and National Public Radio in the United States. The group claimed responsibility last week for hacking the Twitter accounts of world football body FIFA and its president, Sepp Blatter.
The latest attack could have been achieved through a phishing email that compromised the passwords of AP staffers, AP reporter Mike Baker revealed on his Twitter account.
“The @AP hack came less than an hour after some of us received an impressively disguised phishing email,” Baker wrote.
The tweet sparked frenzy in US media in the few minutes before it was exposed as a hoax. The news immediately sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by about 1 per cent, before the index recovered its earlier level after AP refuted the bombing report.