By Paul Vigna 
 
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 The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged within minutes early this afternoon, after somebody hacked an AP Twitter account and posted a bogus tweet saying the White House had been attacked. 
 
 The Dow, which had been up about 130 points, fell into the red within two minutes, and then bounced back just as quickly as it became obvious that the “news” was false, and a prank. 
 
 White House spokesman Jay Carney quickly got on the air and dismissed the story. 
 
 “The president is fine,” Carney said. “I was just with him.” 
 
 The Dow was at 14698 when the bogus tweet hit. Within two minutes, the Dow had dropped 127 points and fallen into the red. It just as quickly rose (you can see this quite clearly in the chart). 
 
 Dow Jones Kaitlyn Kiernan reported: 
 
 “Stocks briefly erased a 125-point gain after a tweet from the Associated Press Twitter account erroneously claimed that there were two explosions in the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured. The Associated Press said on its corporate website that its account had been hacked. The White House confirmed that there was no incident. “The AP’s servers got hacked. People quickly figured that out…see how temperamental the market is? The age of social media, if you’re allowed to monitor Twitter feeds like we are, we see that right away,” said Keith Bliss, senior vice president at brokerage firm Cuttone & Co. “Just goes to show, you shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that comes across Twitter.” 
 
 Here, for your edification, is a screenshot of the fake tweet. 
 
 What stands out to us is how many times that was retweeted, in the parlance of the Twitterverse: at least 1,849 people retweeted that before it was taken down. 
 
 The AP quickly dismissed the tweet: ||||| The Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked on Tuesday. Moments later, the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attack. 
 
 Just after 1 p.m., the news organization tweeted: 
 
 @AP 
 
 The Associated Press Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured 
 
 The message spread quickly, with Twitter users immediately wondering if the account had been hacked. The Associated Press' corporate communications account clarified the tweet was fake minutes later. 
 
 @AP_CorpComm 
 
 AP CorpComm That is a bogus tweet. 
 
 The AP's Sam Hananel, who writes about labor and employment issues, tweeted that the account had been hacked. 
 
 @SamHananelAP 
 
 Sam Hananel Please Ignore AP Tweet on explosions, we've been hacked. 
 
 The AP Stylebook account confirmed the hack. 
 
 @APStylebook 
 
 AP Stylebook The Twitter account has been suspended after it was hacked. The tweet about an attack on the White House was false. 
 
 CBS News reported that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed that "the president is fine," in response to the AP's Twitter feed. 
 
 The AP announced that it would be suspending its Twitter account in response to the hacking. The news organization added: 
 
 The tweet, which said that there had been two explosions at the White House and President Barack Obama was injured, came after hackers made repeated attempts to steal the passwords of AP journalists. 
 
 The AP's Mike Baker tweeted that "the hack came less than an hour after some of us received an impressively disguised phishing email." The false alarm sent the Dow plunging 145 points between 1:08 p.m. ET and 1:10 p.m. The market quickly bounced back to roughly where it had been before the hack. 
 
 The Syrian Electronic Army, an organization that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, tweeted, 
 
 Twitter accounts for CBS News, including the "60 Minutes," "48 Minutes" and CBS Denver feeds, were also hacked last week. The Syrian Electronic Army was also reportedly responsible. ||||| In a world of information, one small fraud by man can equal one giant headache for mankind. And this was way back in 1864. 
 
 As the sun rose over Manhattan on May 18, 1864, thousands of New Yorkers picked up their morning paper to discover that their president was drafting another 400,000 men from their war-torn country to replenish the ranks of the Union Army. 
 
 Most believed that the three-year-old Civil War had to be nearing its final chapter, but both the New York World and the New York Journal of Commerce carried the news from Abraham Lincoln that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s new offensive in Virginia was failing and the president was calling for additional troops as well as “a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer” across the nation. 
 
 Another dark day in a very somber period, except for one thing: The story was utterly false. 
 
 How could two of New York’s largest dailies get such a major announcement — from the president of the United States no less — completely wrong? 
 
 A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. — Winston Churchill 
 
 It was a question that nobody wanted answered more than a furious Abraham Lincoln, who sent federal troops to shut down both papers and arrest their editors when he learned of the hoax. 
 
 But by noon, when the State Department in Washington confirmed that the proclamation had been a forgery, the damage had already been done. The bogus announcement of a new round of conscription had caused shockwaves on Wall Street, sending share prices plunging and gold soaring 10 percent as nervous investors hunkered down for a prolonged war. 
 
 As Winston Churchill would later say, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” An adage that was just as true in the 19th century as in an age of Twitter hacks and flash crashes. 
 
 In this case, the globetrotting lie emanated from a forged dispatch from the Associated Press — precisely what would happen 149 years later when a spurious tweet that Barack Obama had been injured in two explosions at the White House wiped $136 billion from the S&P 500 index in a matter of minutes in 2013. 
 
 But, as Lincoln’s troops occupied their offices in 1864, the besieged editors at the two New York papers were not pointing fingers at the AP’s Twitter feed but to one of the AP’s “flimsies” that had been delivered by courier in the early morning hours. 
 
 Such overnight dispatches from the AP to New York’s seven dailies were the lifeblood of the morning news cycle. But this particular dispatch had been timed perfectly to arrive around 3.30 a.m. — right after the night editors at the papers had gone home but before the day staff arrived, leaving a single night foreman on duty to determine whether to include the dispatch’s contents in the morning edition of the paper. 
 
 The night foremen at New York’s other five newspapers were suspicious enough about the story to ask the AP to verify it, but the World and the Journal of Commerce were sufficiently impressed by quality of the forgery, and its apparent source, to slap the story on their front page. 
 
 Those responsible for the “Civil War gold hoax,” as investigators soon ascertained, were indeed quite familiar with the newspaper business. Three days later, authorities arrested Francis A. Mallison, a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, and Joseph Howard Jr., his boss and the paper’s city editor. 
 
 Those responsible for perpetrating the “Civil War gold hoax”…were indeed quite familiar with the newspaper business. 
 
 As is often the case with fraud, there can be a fine line between stupid and clever, and Howard, the 35-year-old mastermind behind the hoax, strayed onto the stupid side by making a conspicuously large investment in gold a mere day before the news headlines hit. But the disgraced journalist would serve fewer than three months in prison, his release coming just a month after Lincoln issued a very real conscription order for 500,000 more Union troops. 
 
 It should be a comfort that we are no longer a single night foreman’s judgment away from a front-page fraud — but instead we have created a media landscape flush with lone foremen and forewomen, constantly making questionable calls on partial information, and rife with potential conduits for misinformation for the thousands of fraudsters, hackers and modern-day Howards. 
 
 The lies will continue to make their way around the world. The question is: How quickly can the truth pull up its pants?
– Hackers got their hands on AP's Twitter feed today and briefly sent blood pressures racing with an afternoon tweet that President Obama had been injured in a pair of White House explosions, reports the Huffington Post. The real AP tweeted minutes later that it was a hoax and suspended the account. Incredibly, the Dow had been up 130 points before the tweet and lost all of it within a minute, reports the Wall Street Journal. Then it bounced right back to where it was when the hoax was revealed. No official word yet on who's behind the hack, though TMZ says it's the same group that has been "swatting" celebs with phony 911 calls.