Cyber activists are threatening to disrupt a World Bank online conference.

Today's Guardian reports that the Washington-based organisation decided to hold the conference on the Internet in order to avoid demos. The event, which will focus on looking at Globalisation, Poverty and Wealth, was originally scheduled to take place next week in Barcelona.

Sessions during the Internet conference will be interactive, allowing people to submit questions via email to presenters; it this feature that activists will reportedly seek to exploit. The Guardian article does not say who the protestors are or what other hacker techniques, such as distributed denial of service attacks, they might employ.

The Guardian article is headlined: "Cyber war declared on World Bank" but nothing in the piece really justifies such a strident headline.

A spokesman for the World Bank told The Guardian</>: "We've taken reasonable precautions but if there is a major effort to close us down, I can't promise that the computers will hold up". ®

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The Guardian gets in a right old tizz about cyber protests