False Blasts--Cyber Ripples Hit the Associated Press in Spring 2013

False Blasts--Cyber Ripples Hit the Associated Press in Spring 2013

On April 23, 2013, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a group of hackers supporting the Syrian government, took over the Twitter account of the Associated Press, a major US news agency.
The attack sent out a false bulletin stating that there had been an explosion at the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

The fact that the source was the trusted Associated Press, and the fact that the injury to the President of the United States shook the very foundations of the nation, caused an immediate panic in the financial markets.
In particular, at the time, high-speed trading algorithms (HFT), which automatically trade in response to news, were in widespread use, and when the program detected key words such as "explosion" and "injury," it triggered a simultaneous sell order.
This mechanical sell-off, coupled with a cascade of anxiety among actual investors, caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plunge 143 points (about 1%) at one point, and the S&P 500 Index to temporarily lose $136.5 billion (about 13 trillion yen) in market capitalization.

Although the information was later found to be false and stock prices recovered, it was a shocking reminder to the world of how immediate and devastating the impact of false information on social media can be on financial markets.
Investigation revealed that SEA had launched a phishing attack against an Associated Press reporter, stealing credentials in an email purporting to be from a trusted source and gaining unauthorized access to a Twitter account.

The Syrian Electronic Army also targeted the BBC, NPR, the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, among others, in a series of cyber attacks aimed at spreading propaganda and disinformation.
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted three members of the SEA and placed them on the FBI's "Cyber Most Wanted List," along with a bounty.

The incident was more than just a hack; it was an event that exposed vulnerabilities in national security, information reliability, and modern financial markets.
The Syrian Electronic Army's coup de grace has once again confronted the world with the nature of "information warfare" in the Internet age.