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Indeed, the role that hackers play on the cyberwarfare stage is widely underestimated. "I think that a big myth is that cybercrime is still about a 15-year-old kid doing Web defacements," Chabinsky says.

In truth, the hacker element is gaining influence worldwide, and that influence is being targeted by governments.

The threat that has not going unnoticed. Earlier this month, Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) introduced new legislation that would give the federal government sweeping new authority on the cybersecurity front.

The legislation would give the government a more direct role in developing and enforcing baseline standards, not just for agencies but also on companies in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, utilities and health care. It would empower the president to declare a cyberemergency if needed and allow him to disconnect federal or private-sector networks in the interests of national security.

The "digital Pearl Harbor" in which large swathes of the Internet would be taken down by adversaries to create widespread disruption is a possibility that needs to be prepared for, security analysts say. But far more likely and worrying are more focused attacks against critical infrastructure targets such as power, financial services and water services.

The cascading blackout in the Northeast in 2003 remains a potent example of the havoc a computer failure can cause -- even if, as in that case, the incident was caused by negligence rather than malice.

This was demonstrated in 2000 when a disgruntled employee at an Australian water-treatment plant released about 264,000 gallons of raw sewage into nearby rivers and parks by breaking into the control systems using a radio transmitter, he says.

Similarly, in August 2003, a computer virus called Sobig managed to infiltrate a control system at CSX Corp.'s headquarters in Florida and shut down train signaling systems throughout the East Coast for hours, he says.

But make no mistake, he says, the enemy is already here, lurking in sensitive systems and networks, in control of large botnets, inside financial systems and the power grid, and it needs to be stopped.

"My definition of a digital Pearl Harbor is where these people are already here. They already have access and are just sort of hanging out maintaining their access for the time when they get some instruction to bring down the system or corrupt information," he says.

When Bush took office in 2001, a number of top administration officials openly expressed grave doubts about the 1994 accord, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration, and they seized on the intelligence about the uranium facility to terminate the agreement. The CIA provided an unclassified estimate to Congress in November 2002 that North Korea had begun constructing a plant that would produce enough "weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year . . . as soon as mid-decade."

David Albright, a respected former U.N. inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, issued a report last week in which he likened the intelligence on North Korea's uranium facility to the discredited intelligence before the invasion of Iraq that Baghdad was building a nuclear program. "The analysis about North Korea's program also appears to be flawed," he wrote.