Prague — The European Union should not passively follow the dispute over Macedonia’s official name between it and Greece, Czech President Vaclav Klaus told reporters after a meeting with his Macedonian counterpart Dorde Ivanov.
01/21/2011
— Filed under: Politics
Tags: EU, Macedonia, Vaclav Klaus
Romania will seek a (EURO)5 billion ($6,82 billion) precautionary loan from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union this spring, when the current two-year bailout agreement ends, the central bank governor said Monday.
The Government will opt into a European Union directive aimed at taking action against cyber criminals operating overseas, junior home office minister James Brokenshire has said.
The approval by the European Union (EU) Parliament of the bloc’s cut in import tariffs on bananas from Latin America has not gone down well in most African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states.
The number of occupations available to skilled workers coming to the UK from outside the EU will be cut by more than a third under Government plans, a report has shown.
Ireland is now under pressure to meet key banking targets set in the EU/IMF plan, with significant state capital injections likely into the two main banks before a new government is appointed, unless the Central Bank agrees a last minute extension to deadlines it has set.
01/16/2011
— Filed under: Finance
Tags: banking targets, Ireland
The European Union’s bailout fund should be strengthened and its mandate should be expanded to allow it to buy bonds on the market and finance troubled banks directly, a senior Bank of Italy official said on Tuesday.
An Italian judge ordered the seizure of a combined 7,3 million euros ($10 million) from Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) and Lehman Brothers over a 2,2 billion euro securitisation issue, the Naples prosecutor’s office said.
The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has reportedly been investigating a suspected cyber attack on its systems designed to disrupt and spread panic across the markets.
A report in The Times is short on detail, but the paper has been told by «well-placed intelligence sources» that the LSE is currently trying to find the source of the attack.
A cyber security expert is quoted as saying: «The threat is advanced and persistent.»
High-profile security experts have long warned about the risk to the UK’s critical national infrastructure from cyber attacks.
McAfee’s most recent Virtual Criminology report, for example, urged public and private sector organisations to collaborate more effectively to ensure that critical national infrastructures can withstand any cyber warfare attacks.
GCHQ director Iain Lobban said last year that worms have already been designed to cause significant disruption to government systems, while former White House security advisor Richard Clarke told the RSA Conference Europe that the US and UK are woefully underprepared for an attack on critical infrastructure.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, argued that important infrastructure like stock exchanges should be «properly hardened against attacks «.
«I feel that 2011 is the year when political and economic motivation for cyber attacks will become more and more obvious, especially as we’ve seen folks volunteering to become ‘hacktivists’ in recent DDoS attacks,» he said.
Uri Rivner, head of new technologies at RSA Security speculated that the attack may have been an inside job.
«Attacks on secluded networks often use USB devices or components shipped to the datacentre that already carry a Trojan,» he said.
«Fraudsters can have an insider plug USBs into on-site computers or just drop an infected USB in the headquarters, as usually someone is bound to pick the USB up, if only to identify who it belongs to.»
V3.co.uk was waiting to hear back from the London Stock Exchange at the time of writing.
01/13/2011
— Filed under: Business,Crime
Tags: cyber attack, London, Stock Exchange
The European Commission has launched an action plan to reduce the proportion of early school leavers, an issue which is particularly of concern in Malta.
In the EU, 14,4 per cent of students leave school after compulsory education, and the EU aims to reduce the rate to under 10 per cent by 2020.
