At first it appeared to be just another war of words. Raja Petra Kamarudin waging a one-man verbal vendetta against venal and venereal goings-on in government, and his intended targets simply ignoring his sniping, writing it off as nothing but a volley of cheap shots, or taking cover behind a wall of eloquent silence.

But with a general election looming, and with Raja Petra recruiting more and more vocal supporters through Malaysia Today, he started looking less like a lone gunslinger and increasingly like the leader of a dangerous guerilla uprising.

So the Umno big-shots mounted a counter-attack. First, by hiring a hit-squad of renegade bloggers to monitor and sabotage his malaysia-today.net website and similar rebel sites, then sending a cyber swat-team after Raja Petra himself.