Cyprus Mail www.cyprus-mail.com
Thursday, March 28, 2013
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Banking crisis is not all about the Russians
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Banks to open but limits set Daily withdrawals limited to €300, no cheques, and €1,000 for abroad By Stefanos Evripidou
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FTER ALMOST two weeks with no banking system and limited ATM withdrawals, banks across the country will once again open their doors to the public today, introducing temporary capital controls for the first time in the eurozone. Finance Minister Michalis Sarris last night signed into law a temporary decree capping cash withdrawals per person per bank per day at €300, effectively banning cheques and controlling cash outflows from the country, allowing only €1,000 per person per journey abroad. According to sources, the decree will apply across the banking system but allows a significant amount of discretion in its application. The thinking behind this is to allow healthy banks to get on with business while ensuring the newly restructured Bank of Cyprus will enjoy adequate protection during the first moments of its operation, as well as to prevent outflows of cash abroad. The heads of the 26 banks represented in Cyprus were invited to the Central Bank yesterday for a briefing on the new capital controls drawn up by the finance ministry and banking supervisory authority after days of intense preparation. Bank branches will open later than usual today amid heavy security, from 12pm until 6pm, to give bank staff time to become acquainted
with the new restrictions on money outflows. The Legal Service worked on overdrive last night, combing over the finer details to ensure the provisions would withstand legal examination. Meanwhile, truck loads of euro notes arrived at the Central Bank in Nicosia from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt under heavy police escort, including helicopters, ahead of today’s big opening. The millions in hard cash is expected to be distributed among the commercial banks and cooperatives, opening today for the first time since the Eurogroup’s March 16 bombshell decision to impose a haircut on all depositors across the banking sector. Following the uproar both within Cyprus and abroad, the Eurogroup reached a different outcome in the early hours of last Monday morning, with a new decision on the winding down of Laiki and the restructuring of Bank of Cyprus (BOC), with big depositors from both banks expected to take substantial hits. Laiki’s uninsured depositors can expect a massive wipeout while the authorities have suggested Bank of Cyprus’ big depositors may see around 40 per cent of their savings over €100,000 converted into BoC bank shares. All insured depositors with under €100,000 will be saved, while no haircut or levy will be imposed on the deposits of any of the remaining 24 banks on the island. According to the decree, the
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The top of Ledra Street looked almost desolate yesterday with the shuttered bank in the background
(AFP)
Biggest cyber-attack in history slows internet By Paul Sandle and Kate Holton THE internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history after an organisation blocking spam content became a target, with some experts saying the disruption could get worse. Steve Linford, chief executive of Spamhaus, told the BBC that the company had been subjected to attacks on an unprecedented scale for more than a week.
Perpetrators of ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks typically target websites by flooding servers with messages from multiple systems so they cannot identify and respond to legitimate traffic.
REPORTED SCALE “Based on the reported scale of the attack, which was evaluated at 300 Gigabits per second, we can confirm that this is one of the largest DDoS operations to date,” online security firm Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.
“There may be further disruptions on a larger scale as the attack escalates.” Paul Vlissidis, group technical director at internet security firm NCC, said the fact that lots of computers were involved made it much harder to defend against the attack. “If you have a few computers sending large amounts of traffic you can filter them out easily. When literally thousands and thousands are involved it makes it much, much harder,” he told Reuters. He said the volumes of traffic involved in the attack were having a knock-on effect on the rest of the internet.