Early this afternoon, the Twitter account for the New York Post and United Press International were hacked, sending out messages about banks failing, China firing missiles at U.S. ships, and the Pope declaring the onset of World War III.
The Post quickly deleted the tweets, then notified users from their @NYPostBiz account that they had been hacked. The false tweets on UPI’s feed remained for over an hour before they were deleted.
For those unfamiliar, a bail-in is outlined in this article in The Economist:
A bail-out is when outside investors rescue a borrower by injecting money to help service a debt. Bail-outs of failing banks in Greece, Portugal and Iceland were primarily financed by taxpayers.
By contrast, a bail-in, a term first popularised in the pages of The Economist, forces the borrower’s creditors to bear some of the burden by having part of the debt they are owed written off.
What would this mean for the average American? If you owned a U.S. savings bond, the government could devalue it. Luckily that’s not happening (and the Pope didn’t declare World War III either), but whoever perpetrated this attack clearly wanted to inspire financial panic.
