I am sure you all know that at around noon yesterday, the Associated Press had their Twitter account hacked by Syrian hackers. The hack was easy but significant, in that they tweeted that there were explosions at the White House and Barack Obama was injured. It caused the market to tank in a three minute period until the AP was able to communicate that it was not real and someone hacked and posted the fake story.
Here is the tweet via CNN:
Here is how the market reacted in a 3 minute period tanking and then recovering:
Clearly this shows how important Twitter is to the markets. You know, Bloomberg added Twitter to their stock dashboards for traders months ago.
So Twitter says they will be adding two-factor authentication to make these hack attempts almost impossible. The thing is, can you see that working for news organizations that have dozens of people responsible for posting stories to their Twitter feed? Maybe?
Anyway, I know you probably know this news but I need to post it here just because I will likely need to reference back to it in the future.
Twitter has earned the respect of virtually everyone. As the moderator at WebmasterWorld said, "I don't think people would've given this tweet that much credibility if the situation in Boston hadn't just happened."
What do you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
