How to Protect Your Computer From the Bubbleboy Virus

The Bubbleboy virus is the first of a new breed of computer viruses that can attack your system when you simply open or preview an e-mail, without opening any attached files. While it hasn't caused any damage as of yet, it (or variants of it) has the potential to cause serious problems in the future. Currently, Bubbleboy only affects Internet Explorer 5 users with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Anti-virus Softwares

1. Download and install the Bubbleboy patch to Internet Explorer. This will protect your computer from the virus.

2. Turn off the Preview pane in Microsoft Outlook. The Preview pane "opens" the message automatically and thus launches the virus.

3. Use e-mail software that doesn't support HTML-formatted messages.

4. Watch for e-mails that contain "BubbleBoy is back!" as the subject heading. Do not open or preview these messages.

5. Keep your computer virus-scan software up-to-date. Download updates regularly from your scan software provider.

Tips & Warnings

• Bubbleboy exploits a security hole in Internet Explorer 5.0. When you open the HTML-formatted message, the message's HTML code launches a Visual Basic script that exploits this hole. The patch mentioned in step one fixes Internet Explorer.
• Plain text messages cannot execute code, only HTML-formatted messages. Unfortunately, if your e-mail program accepts HTML-formatted messages, there's no way to tell how a message is formatted before you open it.
• Mac and Unix (and Linux) users aren't affected by Bubbleboy, but similar viruses may affect them in the future.