Pro-Assad hackers claim biggest coup When the Syrian Electronic Army managed to hack the Associated Press Twitter account and sneak out a false report of explosions at the White House to the news agency's 1.9m followers it scored its biggest coup yet. The report caused a brief but sharp dip in the US stock market. It also illustrated how the Syrian hackers, who target entities opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad, could use relatively simple techniques to turn their gadfly disruptions into something more menacing. "When you start to do things that have a big impact on the stock market, you are getting away from hacking and moving much closer to something that resembles an actual cyber attack on the US - which takes things into a different area altogether," said one former US official involved in cyber security. The leading S&P 500 share index briefly plunged almost 1 per cent on Tuesday after the false post on the AP Twitter account, which claimed that President Barack Obama had been injured in a double blast in the White House. While AP said it had been hacked, the claimed Syrian Electronic Army Twitter feed crowed: "Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama." The attack is the latest and most infamous in a string of such actions by the SEA since the start more than two years ago of the Syrian conflict , which has claimed more than 70,000 lives. Other alleged targets have included Harvard University, the Qatar-government-funded television channel al-Jazeera, and the BBC weather site, which posted praise for President Assad in its Twitter feed last month. Analysts say the SEA is at the least tacitly supported by Mr Assad's regime and is hosted on Syria's national computer network, which remains under government control. Mr Assad - who was president of the Syrian Computer Society before he rose to national power in 2000 - has publicly praised the SEA's work. Sean Sullivan, a researcher at F-Secure, a Helsinki-based electronic security company, said the SEA's martial pretensions and fondness for altering websites resembled the activities of hackers in neighbouring Turkey. "There is a long history in Turkey of clubs where people give themselves ranks of lieutenant-general and colonel," he said. So it could easily cross over the border into Syria. The SEA says it supports the Assad regime but denies being part of it. In an email interview, an individual contacted via the purported electronic army Twitter feed said the group was made up of "Syrian youth [who] want to defend their country." The person, who did not give a name and signed the email as "Th3Pr0," said the electronic army had attacked targets in western and Arab Gulf countries over their support for anti-Assad rebels. Operations had focused lately on the US media, in retaliation for US sanctions on Syria that had caused an internet service provider to shut down the SEA's main website, Th3Pr0 added. "All the countries who support the terrorists groups in Syria are targets for us - their media/government website/social media accounts," said Th3Pr0. "Our demands [are] to stop suspending our accounts and domain names so we can enjoy the "Freedom speech of America."" Analysts say the electronic army appears to have developed a greater sense of purpose and has expanded its hacking repertoire, although they are sceptical of the group's claims that it is mounting more sophisticated attacks by using malware or assaulting web servers. "They moved from defacing websites to focusing on compromising high-profile, widely followed Twitter accounts," said Helmi Noman, a researcher at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that focuses on the intersection of digital media, global security and human rights. SEA's power now is not on the sophistication of their tools, but their ability to capitalise on the security vulnerabilities of both [the] Twitter access system, and also Twitter account operators. The SEA denies responsibility for what Syrian activists say is the planting by the regime of malware on their computers. But the pro-government hackers have still been publicly waging cyber war against Assad regime opponents. After the hacking group Anonymous claimed in 2011 to have taken down the website of the Syrian defence ministry, the electronic army responded by posting images on an Anonymous website. For now, the SEA appears to be taking delight in its freshly proven capacity to cause mischief, posting a series of defiant tweets about its claimed past triumphs, even as it flitted from one Twitter account - suspended in the wake of Tuesday's attack - to another. "Seventh account of Syrian Electronic Army on #Twitter," proclaimed the main new feed. You will not stop us!