Superman and Rufio are in the 'Love Bug' computer virus movie

FORMER SUPERMAN actor Dean Cain and Dante Basco, who played Rufio in Steven Spielberg's Peter Pan flick, are starring in a computer virus inspired movie that starts showing this weekend.

Subject: I Love You is a fictional account of the 'The Love Bug', an infamous virus that spread quickly in the year 2000, causing significant damage to computer systems in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world.

Targeting Windows and Outlook software, it was released by a Filipino man called Onel De Guzman who created it as part of an undergraduate thesis. It was pretty simple in the way it reached computers, which was through an email with an 'ILOVEYOU' subject line and the malicious attachment.

Computer defences weren't particularly great at the time, so the virus spread extremely quickly, using Outlook's contact list of email addresses to spread itself. More than 40 million Windows PCs were infected, with BT, Vodafone and Barclays, as well as the House of Commons, all hit by the virus outbreak.

The film itself is very much a fictional drama that doesn't really seem to root itself in reality, using The Social Network movie's romantic 'hacker doing it for the only woman he's ever loved' reasoning.

As Graham Cluley, a security researcher at Sophos said, "It sounds like your usual story of 'Boy meets girl. Loses girl. Writes computer virus to infect millions of computers around the world to tell girl he loves her. Gets girl'. Nothing out the ordinary there then." µ