Homepage virus: How to prevent it

At the time of posting there were no virus updates available for the Homepage worm, but there a number of simple steps you can take to help protect yourself

The worm that experts warn could be worse than the LoveBug today infected thousands of PCs around the country. Antivirus vendors this morning said scores of companies had reported infections from the virus which, although not damaging to individual PCs, has the potential to bring down mail servers due to the sheer number of emails it causes to be sent.

In the first 24 hours the email worm -- known to experts as VBS.VBSWG2 and dubbed Homepage -- appears to be more prolific than the notorious LoveBug virus.

The email purports to contain a page to the next Internet craze and has the subject line Homepage followed by a messages reading "Hi! You've got to see this page. It's really cool ;o)". But the email contains a file, called Homepage.html.vbs, which is in fact a malicious Visual Basic script that opens a pornographic Web page on the infected PC and emails a copy of itself to everybody in the users' address book.

Protecting yourself from this and similar email worms is surprisingly easy. To find out how go to ZDNet Download Channel.

Take me to the Virus Workshop

Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the ZDNet News forum.

Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read other letters.