I wonder how much was made with short options by the guys on the inside? Options on Index Futs would do just fine if one was sure of what was going to happen... if it didn't work they could hope to get out at breakeven... If I was going to hack any news service I'd start with AP. They are the most technically backward people on the planet, or at least they were way back in the day. Spearfishing and leaving USB drives in the parking lot are the two easiest hacks to pull off and probably no amount of employee education is going to fix that. Some have gone to the trouble to put corporate logos on USB drives and achieved 100% success in getting somebody to take one from the parking lot to inside the network and plugging it in. I got one inside the network at a nationwide tax prep service come to think of it. I was way late with my taxes and I had a zillion stock trades to account for and the workers weren't looking forward to it, it was late in the day and they let me plug into one of their machines. I wasn't hacking but I recall doing that... It doesn't seem too far-fetched to think that somebody could write some software to surveil email addresses and flag the faked ones.. seems doable... The spearfishing emails have to look similar enough to recipients that some software could block it until the recipient checked with the sender and ok'd it.
Probably zero. No way to tell how - or if - the tweet would affect the markets. It must have been a big surprise to them that the tweet even got through.