A computer hacker group on Friday continued a wave of attacks against Brazilian financial websites, hampering the sites of Citigroup Inc. and other prominent institutions.
The group, which dubbed itself Anonymous Brasil, took aim at a series of websites, launching "denial of service" attacks against the pages of the Brazilian banking federation, called Febraban, as well as Banco BMG, Banco Panamericano (BPNM4.BR) and the pages of Citigroup both in Brazil and in the U.S.
The websites of all those named were operating intermittently Friday, and the hackers said they had extended their attacks to other websites in the afternoon. The hackers say they use "denial of service" tactics to overwhelm websites with requests for access, but that they aren't trying to steal data or money.
A Citi spokesman in New York said, "On Friday morning, Citi's consumer website experienced a temporary interruption in service. Our online team worked immediately to address the issue, and operations were restored within one hour. We are continuing to monitor the system to ensure continuity of services. At no point were there data integrity issues or compromise of client account information. We apologize for any inconvenience."
A spokesman for Febraban said there was an unusually high number of accesses to the group's website. Banco BMG and Banco Panamericano confirmed that they received an overload of accesses that caused delays on their sites, but didn't confirm whether the problems were caused by hackers.
The hacker group also claimed on its Twitter account to have briefly targeted the central bank's website early Friday, though the institution didn't confirm the website problems were caused by hackers. During the morning there was an overload of accesses to the central bank's website bringing instability and delays, the central bank said, but "no bank systems or transactions were affected."
The central bank, which is responsible for banking regulation in Brazil, said it had no immediate action planned to respond to the latest attacks.
The hackers group, which says its promoting a campaign against corruption, earlier in the week claimed responsibility for crippling the websites of Brazil's largest state-run and private-sector banks, including Banco do Brasil SA (BBAS3.BR, BDORY), Itau Unibanco Holding SA (ITUB4.BR, ITUB), Banco Bradesco SA (BBD, BBDC4.BR) and HSBC Holdings PLC (HBC, HSBA.LN).
Anonymous Brasil, which is a collaborative effort between hacker subgroups identified as Anti-Security Brazilian Team and iPiratesGroup, has said that its efforts are aimed at activism to bring more social and economic equality to Brazil, and that it isn't interested in theft.
The group, which announced its attacks via Twitter, has published an action list for further attacks this year, which will include airlines, telephone companies, credit-card companies and government websites. The groups said they also plan to hijack transmissions by radio stations.
Dow Jones Newswires
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HONG KONG — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said Thursday that China would consider working with the International Monetary Fund to help shore up Europe’s finances. But he left unclear whether China was willing to drop conditions that so far have made its proposed help unappealing to European nations.
Mr. Wen’s comments came at a Beijing news conference after he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on the first day of her three-day visit to China.
Mrs. Merkel is the first of several European leaders scheduled to visit China this month, as China’s huge holdings of foreign exchange reserves have begun to give it financial influence that could potentially rival Washington’s.
Mr. Wen said that Chinese officials were studying whether the country should be “involving itself more” in helping Europe solve its debt troubles by investing in the region’s two big rescue packages: the existing European Financial Stability Facility and the planned European Stability Mechanism. China’s contributions could be channeled through the I.M.F., he said.
Read the full story at NY Times.
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Japan's finance and economic ministers piled pressure on the Bank of Japan on Thursday to consider easing policy further, as the yen climbs back to levels that led to Tokyo to intervene heavily in currency markets last year to protect its export-reliant economy.
BOJ Deputy Governor Hirohide Yamaguchi said he saw no need to ease policy right away, but the central bank could face growing calls to offer more monetary stimulus to help exporters through any prolonged slump, even though it has limited options remaining to support the faltering economy.
"Yen buying has strengthened, led by short-term and speculative moves on the back of expectations for low interest rates in the U.S. until 2014," Finance Minister Jun Azumi told lawmakers.
"I would like the BOJ to take account of economic conditions and various factors in deciding policy, including quantitative easing."
Economics Minister Motohisa Furukawa also called on the central bank to ensure that real interest rates remain low, as the Federal Reserve's commitment to keep its nominal benchmark rate near zero for nearly three more years pushes the dollar lower against the yen.
Under the BOJ's initial round of quantitative easing, a technique it pioneered, it flooded the financial system with cash from 2001 to 2006 by targeting the size of current account deposits that commercial banks park at the central bank.
Read more at Reuters.
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Robert Reich
Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock.
I ran into him at National Airport a few years ago and told him I would vote for him for President if he ever thought about running. He laughed and told me that he had no desire for that office.
Our loss. Here's what Robert Reich, a man I greatly admire, has to say about the U.S. economy.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few days ago, said the “critical risks” facing the American economy this year were a worsening of Europe’s chronic sovereign debt crisis and a rise in tensions with Iran that could stoke global oil prices.
What about jobs and wages here at home?
As the Commerce Department reported Friday, the U.S. economy grew 2.8 percent between October and December – the fastest pace in 18 months and the first time growth exceeded 2 percent all year. Many bigger American companies have been reporting strong profits in recent months. GE and Lockheed Martin closed the year with record order backlogs.
Yet the percent of working-age Americans in jobs isn’t much different than what it was three years ago. Yes, America now produces more than it did when the recession began. But it does so with 6 million fewer workers.
Average after-tax incomes adjusted for inflation are moving up a bit. (They increased at an annual rate of .8 percent in the last three months of 2011 after falling 1.9 percent in prior three-month period. For all of 2011, incomes fell .1 percent.)
But beware averages. Shaquille O’Neal and I have an average height of six feet. Exclude Mitt Romney’s $20 million last year — along with everyone else securely in the top 1 percent — and the incomes of most Americans are continuing to slip.
Read Robert Reich's full post.
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South Korea’s central bank is considering buying several hundred million dollars worth of Chinese equities and a greater amount of the nation’s bonds to diversify its foreign-exchange reserves.
“The Chinese yuan has the potential to become a key reserve currency in the long term and thus we are building a channel to invest there,” Choo Heung Sik, 53, director general at the Bank of Korea’s Reserve Management Group, said in an interview in his office yesterday in Seoul. He said the bank may invest in Chinese shares in the second half of this year, after purchases of debt in the first six months.
The diversification plans for South Korea’s $306 billion of foreign-exchange holdings underscore increasing international interest in yuan assets as China’s global economic stature rises and its government promotes international use of its currency. A slide in yields on U.S. Treasuries has diminished interest income for the world’s largest reserve currency, the dollar.
Read full article at Bloomberg.
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