(This story was updated with Selerity's explanation about how it obtained Twitter's financials.)

Traders who were shorting Twitter stock ahead of its earnings announcement Tuesday made a giant windfall. Twitter's shares tumbled 18 percent, and about $5 billion in market cap instantly vanished. Investors were spooked by the $162 million first-quarter loss because the earnings statement was published online about 45 minutes ahead of schedule thanks to a Web-crawling bot that discovered the financials buried deep in Twitter's investor relations page.

Further Reading After a bot finds Twitter’s financial results early, stock plunges 18%

Financial-intelligence firm Selerity of New York is taking credit for publishing Twitter's abysmal results before NASDAQ's closing bell. It says it didn't hack anybody to get them, either. But Selerity's actions remind us of the exploits of Andrew "weev" Auernheimer, who was criminally prosecuted on hacking charges for obtaining and disclosing the personal data of about 140,000 iPad owners from a publicly available AT&T website.

In that case, the Justice Department took the position that AT&T did not intend for the public to see the data and that the links Auernheimer accessed were located in a place that an everyday computer user would never stumble upon. In short, the data he accessed wasn't intended for public consumption despite it being public.

Auernheimer's attorney, Orin Kerr, had argued unsuccessfully that his client didn't hack anything and that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was being construed too broadly against his client. He lost that argument but last year won an appeal on procedural grounds—meaning the government's hacking theory was never decided on appeal.

So did Selerity's actions amount to hacking as defined by the government’s theory of hacking in Auernheimer's case?

"Yes, sounds like it," Kerr, a former federal prosecutor, told Ars in an e-mail.

Further Reading Appeals court reverses hacker/troll “weev” conviction and sentence [Updated]

Selerity got the results by an automated process of refreshing Twitter's investor relations page, where they appeared for 45 seconds. NASDAQ spokesman Joe Christinat told Ars in a telephone interview that the exchange "inadvertently posted Twitter's earnings release prematurely."

Christinat said the bungle was due to an "operational issue."

"During that time, the site was scraped by a third party that publicly disseminated the earnings information," he said.

Selerity tweeted that it obtained the results from the investor relations section of Twitter's site. "No leak. no hack," the company tweeted. Selerity says that when companies are about to release earnings, it scrapes that company's site. The company hit the same jackpot with Microsoft in 2011 and ADP Research Institute in December.

In the Twitter incident, Andrew Brook, Selerity's CTO, said it didn't need to guess any URL.

"We just refreshed the page over and over until it showed up," Brook said in a telephone interview with Ars.

He said the company struck gold about 68 minutes after its automated polling system of at least two bots began refreshing the Twitter investor relations page. He said the page was refreshed "every few seconds."

"Finding that document," Brook said, "was not very hard."