A loophole in the Windows operating system could lead to a devastating attack far worse than the Blaster worm which affected millions of computers worldwide last month.
A general alert was issued yesterday by the government-funded Hong Kong Computer Emergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre, almost two weeks after Microsoft sent out a global warning and posted a free security patch.
Computers running on Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0, NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 are all vulnerable.
Given the potential seriousness of an attack, the head of the centre, Roy Ko Wai-tak, said it was necessary to publicise the threat to non-experts such as home users.
'We notice open communication on the internet among hackers discussing how to create a worm that could exploit the new vulnerability, so we decided to sound the alarm,' he said. 'We are trying to pre-empt an attack before it's launched because the new worm could be more destructive and sophisticated than the Blaster worm.'
An invasion could crash a computer running on a Windows systems, but it may also 'hijack' an infected computer, enabling a hacker to access private files and applications. 'This makes the threat even more serious,' Mr Ko said.