The German government has urged the public to temporarily stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer following discovery of yet-to-be repaired bug in the web browser that the software maker said makes PCs vulnerable to attack by hackers.

The security flaw, which affects hundreds of millions of Internet Explorer browser users around the globe, publicly surfaced over the weekend.

Microsoft had said on Monday that attackers can exploit the bug to infect the PC of somebody who visits a malicious website and then take control of the victim's computer.

The German government's Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI, said that it was aware was aware of targeted attacks and that all that was needed was to lure web surfers to a website where hackers had planted malicious software that exploited the bug in Internet Explorer to infect their PCs.

"A fast spreading of the code has to be feared," the German government said in its statement.