A new breed of image-manager is emerging in the United States to take on the masked and hooded cybermobs who, bolstered by anonymity and weak laws, launch damaging attacks on other web users.

"We are seeing online mobs emerge and launch attacks... with significant consequences, both to the people online and to their reputation offline," University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron told AFP.

The anonymity afforded by the Internet "gives people a kind of strength to be much harsher than they would be in person," Georgetown University sociology professor, and co-founder of International Reputation Management (IRM) Christine Schiwietz said.

Reputation managers step in where the law has failed, to provide "digital botox" to names in need of repair, as Schiwietz put it.

A group of women law students at prestigious Yale University who were attacked online, in what has come to be known as the Auto-Admit scandal, have taken on the services of reputation management group, Reputation Defender.

"Auto-Admit was ostensibly a site for getting advice about going to law school, but it degenerated into attacks on named women who were accused of having herpes, having abortions. They got rape threats, death threats," said Citron.

In a posting made last year, and which remains on the web and AFP was able to see, one of the students was called a whore and had lewd references made to her anatomy by numerous assailants who hid behind bogus pseudonyms such as Marty Lipton King Jr.

Anonymity and strength in numbers are fueling the online attacks.

"Five years ago, you had to create a website to get information on the Internet. That site could be traced to an IP address and there was some accountability," Nino Kader of IRM said.

"But Google owns blogs created on blogger.com. So there is a lack of accountability and that is one reason why people are getting pretty malicious out there," he said.

Citron likened vicious cyber-mobs to the mob mentality of the Ku Klux Klan.

"If you're in a crowd where people hold the same negative view as you, and you feel anonymous, you're going to do things you would never dream of doing if you had no mask and hood on," Citron said.

Reputation Defender is paying for a lawsuit filed by the women in the Auto-Admit case against their attackers, but up to now, victims of cyber-thuggery have had little redress in the courts.

"The law doesn't allow victims to sue the site operators because they aren't writing this stuff," said Citron.

"The difficulty in moving against the poster is that they often write under a pseudonym, are often not required to register with a site before posting, or use anonymizing technology. They are totally masked," she added.

Step in the reputation managers: they not only react to online maligning, as Reputation Defenders did in the Auto-Admit case, but also tout proactivity as the best tool to protect clients from online character assassination.

"It's more and more important to know what's out there about you," IRM's Kader said.

IRM concentrates on how clients appear in a Google search because "unless you are a hermit, you will be googled," Schiwietz said.

"There are around 10,000 Google searches made each second, and googling is expected to double or triple because you will be able to do a search anywhere with a handheld device," Kader said.

"I've been at meetings where people have googled the person opposite them," he added.

One method used by IRM to buff someone's Internet legacy is to get the good news about them as high up in Google search results as possible.

"People are increasingly basing their first impression on what they see on the Internet, but few go beyond the first five results on Google," said Kader.

Someone who could use some digital botox is 34-year-old Michael, whose tale is recounted in "The Future of Reputation: gossip, rumor and privacy on the Internet," by George Washington University law professor, Daniel Solove.

Michael did a stint in prison as a teen and wrote articles about it, Solove writes.

"These articles now come back to haunt him... pulled up anytime somebody does a Google search for his name.

"In one instance, Michael was interviewed several times for a job when, suddenly, the potential employer stopped calling him. His hunch: someone googled him."