OPENING the World Cyber Security Summit in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi warned that with the exponential expansion of the Internet and its related media, "cyberthreats" had growing potential to wreak serious disruption on nations, governments and economies. As a consequence, groups such as the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism (Impact), organisers of the conference, should receive national support and attention. Malaysia's contribution is measured in a more than RM40 million grant to Impact to build its secretariat in Cyberjaya -- a commitment to the cause of guarding against the dark side of what is otherwise receiving a RM15 billion boost with government funds: the now-axiomatic need to keep increasing Internet usage and penetration.

The present scattering of some 1,500 wifi "hotspots" nationwide may seem paltry for the nation's burgeoning number of Internet users, estimated by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission at more than 13 million as of September last year -- a better than 47 per cent penetration of the population, reached by a two million-strong increase over the previous year. As registered subscribers number fewer than five million, however, it would seem that wireless broadband is clearly the uptake of choice among new and existing Internet users, especially with the latest generation of cellphones offering wireless connectivity wherever it's available.

There is no gainsaying the mass empowerment enabled by this modern phenomenon. Organisations like Impact have been set up to guard against the potential of this new electronic ubiquity to render vulnerable governments, financial markets and security systems. "Cyberattacks" can come from a new breed of sophisticated "cyberterrorist", manipulating computer codes the way their anarchic antecedents moulded plastic explosives. Worldwide over the past decade, there have been instances of malicious hackers disrupting life-support systems in remote research stations, disabling transport networks or cyberbombing government servers to disrupt Internet traffic. But global high-tech systems can also be used in very local, low-tech ways. Terrorist groups need not know the arcana of systems coding to organise themselves over the Internet or share information on how to assemble bombs, for example, while cellphones can be used to detonate them.

As Internet usage reaches universality, with electronic media gaining historically unprecedented influence in the shaping of societies, economies and governments, the chorus of approval for ICT's manifest benefits should not drown out the cautionary voices reminding us that no matter how much technology advances, people remain more-or-less the same.