A back up to www.apec2007.org was never called upon despite threats to hack and disrupt the summit's official Web site, said the APEC IT chief.

"We can tell you now," said Gus Kollar, general manager for technology for the APEC 2007 taskforce.

"We were worried that there was a whisper coming to us from our security buddies that our Web site was going to be hacked and defaced."

Kollar said that his team never found out where the threat originated from.

"This was the hilarious thing, they sort of sidled up and nothing happened, and we never found out [who it was]."

"But there was a risk, so we worked out the risk and the most cost-effective solution."

He said that the solution involved putting in place a completely segregated, alternate APEC Web site that could be uploaded in a matter of minutes.

"It had a completely new C-Class addressing range, new DNS service and so on, so that it could be cut over to in about two and a half to three minutes. We never actually used it but the contingency was there."

"We always followed good commercial practice," said Kollar.