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(Reuters) – Plaintiffs in an antitrust lawsuit against Google Inc on Friday withdrew their case accusing the search engine company of harming smartphone buyers by forcing handset makers using Android operating system to make Google's own applications the default option. The class action lawsuit, filed by two smartphone customers in May 2014, was dismissed on Feb. 20 by U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, California. The lawsuit argued that Google requires Android handset manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd favor Google's apps such as YouTube and restrict competing apps like Microsoft Corp's Bing search.

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By Bill Rigby SEATTLE (Reuters) – IBM has uncovered a sophisticated fraud scheme run by a well- funded Eastern European gang of cyber criminals that uses a combination of phishing, malware and phone calls that the technology company says has netted more than $1 million from large and medium-sized U.S. companies. The scheme, which IBM security researchers have dubbed “The Dyre Wolf,” is small in comparison with more recent widespread online fraud schemes but represents a new level of sophistication. According to IBM, since last year the attackers have been targeting people working in companies by sending spam email with unsafe attachments to get a variant of the malware known as Dyre into as many computers as possible. If installed, the malware waits until it recognizes that the user is navigating to a bank website and instantly creates a fake screen telling the user that the bank's site is having problems and to call a certain number.

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The Obama administration on Wednesday launched the first-ever sanctions program to financially punish individuals and groups outside the United States that are engaged in malicious cyber attacks. U.S. President Barack, in an executive order, declared such activities a “national emergency” and allowed the U.S. Treasury to freeze the assets and bar other financial transactions of entities engaged in cyber attacks. Under the program, first reported by the Washington Post, cyber attackers or those who conduct commercial espionage in cyberspace can be listed on the official sanctions list of specially designated nationals, a deterrent long-sought by the cyber community. The move, which the paper said has been in development for two years, comes after a string of high-profile cyber attacks ranging from corporate hacks targeting Target, Home Depot and other retailers, to an attack on Sony and other data breaches.

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By Sarah McBride and Dan Levine SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers was cleared on Friday of claims it short-circuited the career of a former partner because she is a woman, in a gender discrimination trial that shook the tech world. A California jury also rejected a claim that Kleiner, the firm that backed Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc, had retaliated against its former partner, Ellen Pao, by firing her after she sued in 2012. Despite days of courtroom drama about affairs, books of erotic poetry and office flirting, juror Steve Sammut, who mostly voted for Kleiner, said the decision came down to Pao's effectiveness at her job. The verdict dashed Pao's hopes for personal vindication, but the trial revealed embarrassing disclosures about how Pao and other women were treated at Kleiner and Silicon Valley's corporate culture and its lack of diversity.

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By Euan Rocha and Alastair Sharp TORONTO (Reuters) – BlackBerry Ltd posted a surprise quarterly profit on Friday and said it is pushing to end a slide in its revenue in this fiscal year, sending the stock up as much as 5.1 percent. We're now turning our attention to revenue stabilization,” BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen said on a conference call. Chen plans to grow BlackBerry's small but high-margin software division by moving more customers onto its products, including a system that allows companies and government agencies to manage multiple employee devices. The stock rose as high as $9.77, before easing to $9.59, up 3.1 percent on the Nasdaq, despite a much bigger-than-expected decline in fiscal fourth quarter revenue.

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By Foo Yun Chee and Rene Wagner BERLIN (Reuters) – European Union regulators plan a year-long investigation into ecommerce to help remove barriers to cross-border trade in the 28-nation bloc, the EU's antitrust chief said on Thursday. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said she decided to launch the inquiry because such hurdles were hampering the growth of online sales as well as signs that some companies may be deliberately blocking trade. According to the European Commission, while one in two EU consumers shopped online last year, just 15 percent of them bought a product online in another EU country. “It is high time to remove remaining barriers to ecommerce, which is a vital part of a true Digital Single Market in Europe,” Vestager told reporters.

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By Paul Lienert DETROIT (Reuters) – Global automakers are readying a new generation of mass-market electric cars with more than double the driving range of today’s Nissan Leaf, betting that technical breakthroughs by big battery suppliers such as LG Chem Ltd will jump-start demand and pull them abreast of Tesla Motors Inc. At least four major automakers — General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co, Nissan Motor Co Ltd and Volkswagen AG — plan to race Tesla to be first to field affordable electric vehicles that will travel up to 200 miles (322 km) between charges. The new generation of electric cars is expected to be on the market within two to three years.

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By Matthew Miller and Gerry Shih BEIJING (Reuters) – IBM Corp will share technology with Chinese firms and will actively help build China's industry, CEO Virginia Rometty said in Beijing as she set out a strategy for one of the foreign firms hardest hit by China's shifting technology policies. IBM must help China build its IT industry rather than viewing the country solely as a sales destination or manufacturing base, Rometty said at the China Development Forum, an annual Chinese government-sponsored conference bringing together business executives and China's ruling elite.

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(Reuters) – Walt Disney Co CEO Bob Iger learned that Steve Jobs' cancer had returned less than an hour before Disney announced it was buying Jobs' Pixar studio in 2006, and Iger kept the Apple co-founder's condition a secret for three years, according to Bloomberg, citing a new biography of Jobs. Iger told the authors of “Becoming Steve Jobs” he thought about the implications of keeping such a secret at a time when regulators were calling for more disclosure and holding executives more accountable to their fiduciary duties, Bloomberg reported. The $7 billion deal to buy Pixar made Jobs Disney's largest shareholder and put him on the entertainment company's board.

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China's Defense Ministry on Friday denied that it had anything to do with a cyber attack on Register.com, a unit of Web.com, following a report in the Financial Times that the FBI was looking into the Chinese military's involvement. “The relevant criticism that China's military participated in Internet hacking is to play the same old tune, and is totally baseless,” the ministry said in a fax to Reuters in response to a question about the story. It is not clear what the Chinese military would be looking for or what it would gain from Register.com's data. China and the United States regularly accuse each other of hacking attacks.