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Web giants Yahoo and Google both showed signs of suffering from the economic crisis this week by announcing significant cutbacks to various parts of their businesses. Just a day after announcing that Carol Bartz will replace Jerry Yang as chief executive, Yahoo decided to ditch its Content Match advertising partnership program in Europe.
Two-thirds of online shoppers carry out Internet-based research about retailers before making a purchase, yet only half of retailers actually monitor their own reputation, according to new research by 1&1 Internet. The hosting firm surveyed over 1,500 consumers and over 400 companies and found that nearly half of UK shoppers read online reviews or recommendations about specific products before buying them.
Virus writers are likely to unleash increasingly sophisticated strains of malware next year in an attempt to bounce back from some high-profile botnet shutdowns in 2008, according to new predictions from managed security provider MessageLabs. The company predicted that hackers will launch new attacks in which malware will exist as a virtualization layer running directly on the hardware.
Newly organized methods of online criminal activity are threatening to democratize fraud and undermine banks and online traders, according to security experts at this year’s RSA Conference Europe. Security vendor RSA’s Head of New Technologies Uri Rivner shared new data and trends spotted by the firm’s Anti Fraud Command Center, which has now shut down over 100,000 phishing attacks.